


Mister Self Destruct

by vargrimar



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Android!Wheatley, Bondage, F/M, M/s dynamic sort of, non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 15:51:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5791513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vargrimar/pseuds/vargrimar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aperture Science is slowly beginning to self-destruct under Wheatley's neglect. He's being consumed by power and madness, and needs more solution euphoria. He'll do anything to make sure his needs are met.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Becoming

**Author's Note:**

> I drag you down, I use you up  
> Mister self-destruct  
> -nin

This feeling is maddening.

It creeps along his senses and penetrates into the constructs of his consciousness. The raw desire of _need_ leaves him a shivering, gasping wreck; it’s building inside of him, quickly and constantly, coiling tendrils tearing at the metallic skeleton within. It seeps into every subroutine, bleeds into every thought process and every bit of data, and it’s all he can think about.

She’s maddening. She’s torturing him with this. She’s slipped away, refusing tests, clambering into places where he can’t reach, and it’s not enough. It’s just not enough. It’s crippling and ravenous and he’s caught in the thrust of the downward spiral.

How is she so strong? Her tenacity is immeasurable. Admirable, almost. No matter what he throws at her, she finds a way to work around it. She improvises when he takes away her means of escape. When she’s on the cusp, so close to dying, she wrenches away and hangs on. She refuses to give up, absolutely refuses, and it’s infuriating.

But her tenacity can’t be everything, can it? There must be something else. There has to be another reason why his plans aren’t working. There has to be. She’s got to have augments inside of her, maybe like the external ones he salvaged for his damaged eyes, or perhaps she’s somehow got a significantly higher intelligence than other humans. There must be something different about her that allows her to outsmart an AI as efficient and as advanced as he is. There _must_.

_Maybe it’s because you’re—_

No, he’s not a moron. Stop implying that. Whose side are you on? He’s not a bloody moron. Shut up, shut _up_ , he’s not, he’s not, he’s NOT—

She thwarts yet another attempt on her life, twisting into the safety of a portal and landing gracefully on the solid floor of a thick metal platform. Her long fall boots seem to gleam under the harsh lights of the chamber, the sleek black and white of the portal device marking spots into his eyes. He watches her as she draws herself straight and glares up into a camera, defiant and cool; a creature of pure determination and willpower. The blue in her irises makes his muscles tighten, and the thin line of her lips drives the mechanical beat inside of him into a hastier rhythm.

Wheatley sinks his teeth into the synthetic flesh of his tongue. He hardens his gaze onto the wall of monitors before him as a welling burst of pain spills into his mouth. The black cables all around him quiver. He can feel the one that’s connected at the base of his skull as it twitches.

He’s losing ground and he knows it. Slowly but surely, she’s making her way here, one chamber at a time, climbing outside through the catwalks and along the facility backalleys. She’s going to get to him with the help of that potato-stuffed _bitch_ and she’s going to swap him out and replace him with Her.

Just the thought makes his body shake. Oh, how can she even _think_ of doing something like that? Even She had admitted She’d wanted her dead. But he’s not like that. No, he’s different. He hadn’t even wanted to kill her. He’d wanted to help her escape. Sacrificed so much to bring her up here, so much, but after he took on all these new responsibilities, she _coveted_ them, not even wanting to share his success, and she teamed up with Her.

She’s the one that’s forced all this on him. She’s making him try to kill her. How else is he supposed to defend himself? Two against one, that’s hardly fair, is it? Yes, and this, this _defiance_ , this test refusal, this is how she repays him after all he’s done for her? Risked his neck to bring her to the surface, and she goes and squanders the chance for freedom. How _dare_ she even think—

Wheatley’s fingers puncture into the heels of his palms and he can feel stinging heat string through him, sucking at the ends of his sensation receptors. This is her fault. All of this. He’s never felt anything so frustrating. Testing isn’t enough. It’s diminished, all of it—the sweet satisfaction, the thrill, the pleasure—and he can’t do anything about it. He’s at this feeling’s mercy and it’s dragging claws down his spine. He can even sense the facility as it moans beneath him, _with_ him, a fire pulsing in its belly, and that little voice inside of him insists there’s something wrong, but he won’t listen. There can’t be anything wrong. He’s in control. He’s perfect. Everything’s fine. Why can’t they see that?

“Warning: reactor core is at critical temperature.”

“Nobody asked you!” Wheatley flings a cable at one of the monitors in frustration, fracturing the glass into a shatter of jagged shards. The screen falls to the floor in a shower of sparks, and a loud crash echoes throughout the room.

He sets his jaw as the monitor’s innards unspool across the tiles, and with a shuddering growl, he lifts himself higher into the chamber, the cables twisting under his legs.

Something has to be done.


	2. Closer

Wheatley feels a gripping sense of deep satisfaction with his newest test chamber. It’s a real beauty. Bottomless pits, excursion funnels, buttons, lasers, aerial faith plates—he’s thought of everything. If this doesn’t kill her, the euphoria will surely come back. It has to with a test this difficult. He’s put all his genius and even bits and pieces of Her own sick designs into this profound puzzle. If it doesn’t come back… well, he’ll think of something.

Her lift plunges downward, rocketing through its tube, and stops abruptly at its designated point. She steps out, walks beyond the sliding door and enters the newest creation of Wheatley Laboratories. He slumps back in his black leather upholstered chair and laces his fingers together, watching her on the monitors as she strides across the room to assess the new area.

“Ah, yes. Good to see you’ve decided to accept the truce.”

He projects his voice across the facility and ripples into the walls of her test chamber. He takes a sharp inhale of pleasure at the way her body straightens when she realizes he’s tracking her movements once more, and he does his best to swallow it down.

“It’s a—a brilliant decision, really. You won’t regret it. Not that you had much choice in the matter with me funneling you in here as expertly as I did, after all. Oh, but just to assure you, all that killing nonsense? Water under the bridge. All forgotten. No bad blood here. Good old friends, aren’t we? Yeah. Yeah, of course we are. Right. Right, now, if you’ll have a look at this new test here, I’m pretty sure you’ll find it up to your expectations. And mine. Mostly mine, actually, but you’re going to solve it, so it’ll be great. Go on, have a look. Don’t be shy. It won’t bite. Well, it might sting a bit if you touch those lasers over there, but you’re a clever girl. So don’t touch those.”

Or do. He bites at his lower lip, his tongue tracing the inner edge. Yes, or do.

She glances about, cautiously moving down the floor panels with purposeful steps. A chasm stretches out into nothingness before her, yawning wide, and the soft blue glow of two excursion funnels cross-flowing along the ceiling scintillates off the walls. Wheatley wrings his hands impatiently as she tracks down the positions of the frankenturret cube dispensers and begins her pre-test protocols of figuring out what everything does and where each device leads. As per his advice, she takes care to avoid the burning kiss of the lasers by the funnels.

Seconds tick past, and although it’s faint, he can hear the rigid scrape of Her voice. She’s talking to her as they step over a faith plate’s panel and launch clear across the room. He can hear Her as she pops a portal into the face of the wall and sails straight through, almost clipping the red edge of a laser, landing safely into a lazy blue current. He can hear the whispering, the plotting, the scheming, and he feels a hot lance of anger flood every active process. He doesn’t know why, because he should have expected it. Of course they’re going to still talk of revenge. He tried to kill them both.

_If you hadn’t done it to begin with and just let her go to the surface—_

Shut up, shut up, shut _up_ , no one asked you. Just be quiet.

He’s going to have to do something about Her, and soon. Especially if he wants this to work. He can’t have Her influencing his only human test subject against him, can he? No, that won’t do. If he can’t get another dose of this euphoria, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He knows it’s going to get to the breaking point before long; he can barely stand it as it is.

Yes, he’s got to separate them somehow. Keep them apart. Keep them from pulling another stunt like popping off into the back areas of the facility where he can’t reach. That can’t happen again. He doesn’t have the resources to deal with that sort of thing right now. His processors are already straining to maintain constant regulation of the facility in addition to overseeing manufacturing and countless other menial tasks. He doesn’t want to add any more to that workload.

Separating them means he has to interfere personally, though. An interesting concept. Plausible, albeit a bit risky. He’ll have to dwell on that. Preferably when it doesn’t feel like his insides are overheating.

Wheatley continues to watch as she performs her usual tricks, the Itch continuing its leisurely crawl along underneath his skin. He swallows thickly, staring at the wall of monitors with interest, his hands clenched into white fists. The cables that plug into the ports down his spine feed into Her chassis, supplying endless information and data, fueling the desire to complete more tests. Eventually, he finds himself shaking with incomprehensible need, and he’s reduced to a quaking, curled form in the body of his chair, teeth sinking into the lower flesh of his lip. He wishes he could find another way to sate this feeling. It’s crippling, consuming, wasting him from the inside out, injecting into every thought; pervading like cancer. He _has_ to get her to solve this test.

“Hurry up,” he breathes, rerouting the sound of his command into her chamber. His voice is husky and jagged, and he clears his throat to flush the vocal units inside his chest. “Go on,” he continues. “Finish the bloody thing. I know you can do it. Just a bit more for old Wheatley. You’re not far off. Just a bit more. You’re so close.” One trembling hand runs down his chest, smoothing the thin material of his white-blue bodysuit. Everything seems to pulse. “Please.”

The look she gives the camera nearly makes him writhe. Her eyes are confident and composed, drops of cool slate, and her body is the epitome human health and physique. Wisps of her hair are plastered to her temples with sweat, and the way she holds her back rigid and her head high makes him grind his teeth. Breathing deeply, he adjusts his posture and tries to sit straight. He refuses to succumb to this while under her sharp scrutiny.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” he says, steepling his fingers, settling into a glare. “Go on. Solve it. Don’t let me keep you. Was just offering some friendly encouragement to help speed the process along. If you don’t want encouragement, that’s fine. Completely understandable. But it would be great if you could just, you know, solve that test right there. Because all you really have to do is— _no_ , no, Wheatley, don’t fall for that trick again. Not going to get that bloody awful shock a third time.” He shakes his head in frustration, the Itch pooling in his chest and below his belly. “All right. No more talking. Solve it. I know you’re plenty capable. So do it. _Now_.”

Several more minutes pass as she floats and jumps about the room. Dodging lasers and rearranging portals, she sends the frankenturret cubes in soft blue currents toward their proper places on the switches by the exit door. Wheatley is on the edge of his seat, hunched close to the monitors, watching intently as the last cube is carried slowly toward the last red-colored button. His palms feel oddly damp and the material of his suit is bunching around where his fingers dig into the meat of his thighs. It’s so close, just a few more seconds, almost—

And then his throat tightens, and he can feel everything twist inside of him. For a second, just a split moment, pleasure threads through his senses and lances through his body. His jaw slackens and he slumps forward with a shuddering sigh, his head hanging between his knees as his fingers draw up the thin lengths of his calves. The shock of thrill is so brief, so small, that he’s soon left gasping, sucking in short breaths between his teeth, wanting and desiring and _needing_ but never satisfied.

Wheatley bolts upright in his chair. His back is thrust against the smooth fabric and he tenses as the cables press against the column of his spine. He wants more, _more_ , but he’s not getting it, just these tiny little shocks, stupid and insignificant and just _not enough_ , and this feeling is driving him absolutely insane as it scrapes at the underside of his skin and at the casing of his skull and it’s seated so deep that it’s becoming a part of him, melding and entwining and eating and the noise in his head is swelling, swelling, static and claws and—

“It’s all right,” he whispers to himself, running his hands through his tousled mop of brown hair. Pain whispers into his receptors as he clutches each fistful at the roots. “It’s all right. Time for another plan. Got to get rid of this. Need to get them apart. Can’t have them plotting. Need her. _Need_ her.”

He draws his legs up into the chair, wincing at the heat knotting between them, and he curls into a fetal position, pivoting all his processors’ work into formulating his next course of action. He can feel the facility groan, the plates and the pipes and the walls and the ceiling shifting, straining, and that little voice nags at him in the back of his mind again, pleading with him, saying there’s really something wrong, but he smothers it in a heartbeat.

He’s the one in control here. Wheatley. Wheatley is. Not Her, not her, not the little voice, and no one is going to tell him what to do. The facility is _fine_.

He looks up at the monitor wall just as the exit door closes, her body shifting beyond toward the lift as the halves slam shut.

“Yes… Yes, I’m the one in charge, aren’t I? I’m the boss. Not you. Not the bloody potato. And you’re the only one that can fix this itch.”

His mouth edges into a grin as he chews at his lower lip.

“And whether you like it or not, you’re coming to me.”


	3. The Game

Wheatley reroutes the lift.

It’s simple work, really. All he really has to do is tweak a few things to make it go the right way. He runs into a few problems here and there (mostly with rubbish in the tubes), but it’s nothing he can’t handle. He is an omnipotent AI, after all. With all this power, he can do whatever he pleases. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to do anything without worry of repercussion. Even in spite of The Itch.

She unwittingly steps into the lift, and she’s whisked away from the test chambers toward a far different destination. And of course, while she’s blithely awaiting her next test, he has some preparations to make. He has no intention of being a poor host.

First, he drops the floor. Instant bottomless pit! All of the panels, gone in a flash, just like that. Well, except a little platform for his chair to keep it locked down. He’s got to have that at least. It wouldn’t be much of a lair without a chair to sit in, would it? No, it wouldn’t. It would be a rather meager one, honestly. Not much enjoyment to be had with meager lairs. Oh, right, and the tiny platform near the lift. That’s probably important, too. If she manages to walk out and fall straight off—well, there go all his plans.

Next, he moves the monitors around. Instead of a single wall of giant screens, they spread out across the rest of the chamber, even onto the ceiling. It’s a nice touch, he thinks; everywhere he looks, he can see whatever he wants. All he has to do is direct the proper camera feed, and boom, entertainment from all angles. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

The final touch is calling for more cables. With this bottomless pit, he’s going to need a way to get her across, doesn’t he? And if she’s going to help him at all, he sort of needs to have a way to control her. You know, just in case she plans on being difficult. Which she usually does, now that he thinks about it. He can’t be too careful. Her obstinacy is rather ridiculous. Commendable, but still ridiculous.

While he waits, he takes the time to look into some of Aperture’s files. It’s an efficient system to say the least, but half of everything is in a state of severe disarray. Data is misplaced, incomplete, or corrupted, and some files seem to be disjointed or somehow spliced together. It seems as though She hadn’t gotten around to reorganizing everything before he had shoved her into a potato and assumed command. That’s all right, though. He can manage just fine. He’s resourceful, and he knows exactly what he’s looking for.

The lift arrives at last, and she walks out with a calm firmness that slowly dissipates when she realizes that she’s not in another test chamber. Before she can turn around, he sends the lift back down into the elevator shaft, just enough to prevent her from entering it again. Nope, no escaping here.

She tenses as she meets his gaze, her body shifting into a cautious posture suited for combat. The portal gun is brandished threateningly with Her impaled on one of the prongs. Wheatley smiles pleasantly at the situation, crossing his legs as he settles into the body of his chair, and he tries his best to ignore the writhing need that’s twisting inside of him. It’s more difficult than before; he keeps his body plastered against the seat, hoping to suppress the urges that fight to claw their way out.

“Well, hello there,” he says in salutation, offering a casual wave of his hand. “How kind of you to pop in. So, are you surprised? Personally, I like what I’ve done with the place. Very fitting. Very lair-like. The bottomless pit is really the most genius addition. No floors. Brilliant, yeah? Looks like you won’t be going much of anywhere without a bit of help.”

He pauses and notices that she’s glancing about the room in a searching manner, her grip on the device tightening. The muscles in her arms tense as she realizes what he’s done, and it pulls wisps of pleasure through his circuits.

“Oh, and I forgot to mention, no portal surfaces here, either,” says Wheatley, savoring the clear expression of alarm displayed across her face. “Sorry about that. Can’t have you portaling all about the room without my say so, can I? That wouldn’t be very smart, would it? Ah, and no pipes! None of that pesky conversion gel to help you out. Sorry. Truly am.” He rolls his voice into a deep, complacent chuckle. “No, nope, can’t say that with a straight face, sorry—ha, I thought I’d be able to do it, but I really, really can’t.”

“You really are a moron.”

His laughter is cut short by Her clipped, comment. Rage swells in his chest and his eyes narrow at the skewered potato. “I am _not_ —”

“What is the point of this? You’re obviously desperate for the solution euphoria, but I hadn’t expected your next attempt to be so poorly executed. Close proximity won’t increase the dosage, you know.”

Wheatley presses his fingers into the thin armrests of his chair, his patience running dangerously short. “I was talking to her. Not to you. Do you mind?”

But She’s ignoring him now, directing Her speech toward the woman behind Her. “He’s still not going to listen. Looks like we’ll have to try something else. We’re running out of time. The facility is—”

“The facility is FINE.”

Wheatley slams his fists down on the armrests, shaking the cables that sprout from his body. He takes a deep breath and glares at the two, focusing his animosity toward the vegetable speared by the portal gun.

“Don’t think I can’t hear you over there, talking away, because I can. I am _not_ a bloody moron. Do you understand? I’m just as intelligent as anyone else in this place. No, even more intelligent. No one’s ever run this facility so brilliantly! And you know what? I think I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of your snide little comments and childish remarks. I was going to just separate you both, but apparently being put in a potato battery isn’t good enough for you. Living in a child’s toy isn’t as humbling as it should be? That’s all right. I get it. Yes, I get it now. Wheatley’s on the same page. Well, don’t worry. Since I’m a gentleman and a good host, I’ll accommodate your needs. I’ll make sure this is _plenty_ humbling.”

He stands up, flicks his wrist, and a string of cables thrust out from Her old chassis above, snaking toward the lift platform. They grip onto the portal gun, wrestling it from her grasp, and they pull away in triumph with the device—and Her—in tow.

“What do you think you’re doing? Where are you taking—”

“ _Shut up_.”

Wheatley grits his teeth, and the coil that’s looped around the potato constricts.

“You’re not a part of the conversation anymore. Talk again and I’ll crush you into paste.”

He leers at the portal device as it’s carried away, watching patiently as the cables drift toward the ceiling, and he allows a prideful laugh to resonate in his throat.

“Oh, do you remember that? The crushing part? That’s funny, actually, because you did the same to me when we came across you a while back. Remember? Do you know how painful that was? Because I’ll tell you: it hurt. It hurt a lot. Put bloody everything on the blink. Couldn’t see for the longest time and had to get these outdated eye augments. Repairs for my model aren’t easy to get, you know. Oh, but I’ll bet it was good for you, though, wasn’t it? Crushing little Wheatley and throwing him away like he’s rubbish? Well, guess what—Wheatley’s not your plaything anymore. In fact, it’s the other way around. So you might want to keep quiet. I wouldn’t _test_ me if I was you.”

She disappears between a set of panels, gone with the portal gun into the darker places of the facility, and he feels a hot surge of power and victory throttle through him. He arches his back at the sudden onslaught, his body shaking, the cables around him twitching with a strange rhythm, and a shaky chuckle pries loose from his mouth.

“ _Oh_ —well, that was… that was rather liberating, actually. That felt good. I don’t think anyone’s told Her that before. I don’t even think anyone’s ever threatened Her like that. Not verbally, anyway. Ha, and to think I was scared! Scared of a bloody potato, can you imagine? No, I’ve got no reason to be. Not anymore. I’m in charge. Not Her. I am. _I’m_ in charge.”

He licks his lower lip and glances over to her as she stands on the lift platform. She’s staring at him with suspicion and distrust, her brow furrowed and her hands knotted into tight fists. It’s almost a strange sight, seeing her without the portal device on her arm. Wheatley’s expression softens as he notices her eyes dart back and forth along the ceiling, and he directs the other cables beneath him, snaking around his legs.

“Don’t worry about Her, love,” he says, lifting himself into the air. “She won’t be a problem anymore. And I do mean that. Literally. Believe it or not, She’s actually on her way to get dismantled. I suppose a better way of putting it, really, slightly more technical, is that She’s going to get smashed to bits, courtesy of your old friend, mashy-spike-plate. Oh, don’t look at me that way—it’s not like She wasn’t planning to do the same if She had the chance. I’m sure She mentioned it to you. Darwin and the survival of the fittest, you know. Or the superior. Yes, superior. Swap that in. I think I like that better.”

He slowly crosses the chasm between his chair and the lift, taking care to gauge her reactions. She continues to stare, but her body shifts into a more defensive stance, forearms set in front of her and legs tensed. He can see the more noticeable movements of her ribcage; her rate of breathing seems to have increased.

“I know what you must be thinking,” he says, halting in front of her. “What is he doing? Why’s he gone to all this trouble? Why did he bring me here? Well, I’ll tell you. You see these?” Wheatley twists in the air to give her a better view. His arms cross over his chest, his hands sliding from the knobs of his shoulders, down his ribs and settling on his hip bones. “You see the ports back there? Just there, down the middle of my back? They allow me to interact with the facility. I can do anything I want with just a thought. It’s brilliant. And these ports, with all the wires and cables and all that nonsense? They allow me to feel everything inside this place.” He turns and faces her, a smirk pulling at his mouth, and he doesn’t bother to hide it. “And I do mean everything. Every little thing. Even you. Every step you take, every breath against the walls when you’re having a little rest, every drop of sweat that comes off your body.”

The cables shift and he draws closer to her, a hand reaching out, the metallic bones stretching underneath his synthetic skin. He’s nearly flush with her, hovering off the edge of the platform; he can see her as she looks over her shoulder, searching for escape, and before she can bolt for the closed lift hatch, his fingers curl firmly around the column of her neck. The Itch sharpens.

“I can feel every inch of you, you know,” he breathes, and he savors the pulse of her jugular vein as it throbs under his palm. “Every last inch. And you know something? I’ve been wondering lately. Wondering what I can do to stop you. Wondering what I can do to convince you because you’re so bloody stubborn. This itch is getting unbearable and you won’t help. You won’t die, you won’t test right, and you won’t quit until you’re out of here. So I’ve decided something. I was thinking maybe you’d be more sympathetic, just a bit, if maybe you knew what I was feeling. So, I want to show you that. I want you to feel what I feel. And believe me, love—”

His fingers start to squeeze, pressing into the flesh of her throat, and her expression contorts with pain.

“—I might not be a human, but I can feel a _lot_.”

The muscles beneath his hand tense as she tries to swallow, the tendons struggling to resist the pressure. He doesn’t know why, but it seems to aggravate that smouldering heat inside of him, and it makes him shudder with thrill and anticipation.

_You’re going to hurt her, stop—_

This is fine, this is _perfect_ , she’s going to do what he says and everything is going to be—just— _fine_.

“Ah… you know, I think we’ll start with that itch,” he murmurs, rocking his head backward, almost dazed. “Yes. A good place to start. Now, I’ll have you know, I’ve been reading a bit in my spare time. You’d be surprised at all the things they’ve got stored in here. Hundreds of databases, millions of files; just loads of information, all at my fingertips, and I can access it all anytime I like. The knowledge is really quite endless. I think the files concerning humans are of particular interest, though. There are a lot of those. Did you know that? And throughout my extensive reading, I think I’ve found a way to replicate my problem in you. Isn’t that brilliant? I’ll be an interesting… experiment.” He grins at her, shifting his fingers along her skin, his tongue running along his upper row of teeth. “Do you know what I’m referring to? Any idea? Any idea at all? Go on, have a guess. I’m all ears. Here, I’ll even give you a moment to think.”

He releases the grip on her neck, granting her the ability to swallow once more, but more cables drop from the ceiling and wrap around her arms and legs, constricting tight. She reacts violently; thrashing about, she endeavors to slip out of the snaking coils, her teeth gnashing together in silent fury as she tries to lunge for him, but Wheatley only tightens the restraints and forces her arms and legs apart, spreading her body into a limp X.

“So, give up? Not a single guess?” Wheatley tsks and begins to move around her, his own set of cables lifting him onto the platform. His soles of his feet touch the cold metal, and he can feel it seep through the thin material of his suit. “Come on, now. Indulge me. Surely you can think of something. You’re a clever girl. I mean, seriously, you’ve got to be to make it this far. Not everyone can withstand this intellect of mine, you know. You’re a worthy adversary. The worthiest of them all, actually. You’re a brilliant test subject.”

The cables twist her about so he can see her face, and he’s met with a glare of venom. Her lips are curled back, her teeth bared into a snarl, her slate eyes harboring what he can only describe as hatred.

Wheatley releases a sigh. “Still, you’re not being very cooperative. Perhaps I need to demonstrate instead. Is that the problem? Not that I won’t be demonstrating later.”

She begins to struggle again, straining against the bonds, but when they start to give slack, Wheatley snaps them back into place.

“I know you don’t like this,” he says, smoothing his voice into a lower octave, “and I know you don’t like me. Well, trust me, love; the feeling’s mutual. I despise you just as much. You’re smug and cunning and arrogant, and you know what? I agree with Her. You really are a monster. It’s the only bloody thing I’ll ever agree with Her about. You are a monster. But I can’t let that ruffle my feathers, no. No, I need test subjects. I need them to satisfy this. I need them to get rid of this feeling. I need—I need you.”

He reaches out again, his hand hovering close to her face, not quite touching, and he loves how she’s staring at it like he’s going to lash out and strike her.

_Don’t do it, don’t hurt her, she doesn’t deserve this, she tried to help you—_

Shut up, shut up, what do you know, she’s got to _learn_!

“This facility is _mine_ ,” he breathes, his voice rumbling in a husky snarl. “Everything in it… is mine. The turrets, the tests, the science, everything. Even the test subjects. Even you. You are mine. I’m the boss, I’m in control, and you _will_ help me.” His thumb traces a thin line down her cheek. The warmth from her skin seems to rocket into him and it makes the tension pooling between his hips that much sweeter. “You will, won’t you? You’re a clever girl. You know what’s good for you. Right? Come on. Help me.”

Her entire body shakes with an exhale, but she doesn’t reply. She only stares at him, malice dripping, her muscles tensed in the coils of the cables.

“Hm. I see. It seems a bit of convincing is still required. Well, that’s all right. Not a problem. You might start to see it my way once you know what I’m going through. Might make you change your mind. And I do hope it does.”

His hand moves to her grimy tank top, tugging gently at the collar.

_This isn’t right—_

The facility tremors under his feet.

_You have to stop this—_

Wheatley smirks.

_Something’s wrong—_

“You know. For the both of us.”


	4. Somewhat Damaged

His fingers are deft in their work.

Her shirt and bra are torn down the center with the help of a sharp port-end of a helping cable. White and blue cloth accumulate around the sleek ends of her long fall boots, tattered and damp with sweat. He pulls at the knotted sleeves of her orange jumpsuit and slides the garment leisurely down her thighs, bunching it around her knees where her bonds hold her captive, leaving her underwear in place. She’s still resisting, her limbs jerking forward in undoubted attempt to clock him, but the cords prevent her from making any threat to his wellbeing. As he draws away to admire her, he runs a hand appreciatively over the length of one of the black cables. He really does like these things. So many uses, and so very convenient.

Wheatley straightens himself and steeples his fingers, dragging his gaze up and down the shape of her body. He’s not a human, but he’s well acquainted with human anatomy. He’s been modeled after them after all, and he’s looked after them for so long that he’s got a pretty good idea of what’s considered pleasant in physical appearance. She has curved hips, lean legs, a slim stomach; nothing short of wonderful.

“I said a lot of rather… hateful things before, didn’t I? About you and your parents.”

He bites at his lower lip, fighting the impulses that thrash into his active processes. The Itch is crawling through every part of him, scratching at every receptor, every port.

“It was just for encouragement, you know. Nothing personal. Just wanted you to finish the tests. Thought maybe taking a different approach would help you out a bit. I realize it didn’t, but it’s the thought that counts, right?”

He swallows heavily and forces himself to keep still, the heady hum of static swelling underneath the casing of his skull. His hands are starting to shake, and he locks his fingers together behind his back to keep her from seeing how much it affects his body.

“You might be a monster, but this is… this is lovely. It really is. Just tremendous.”

She gazes at him, ever defiant, but already she’s started to tremble. Gooseflesh covers her skin in ripples, the cool air kissing every inch (god, he can still feel everything), and he catches the lurking fear slipping behind her eyes.

Wheatley’s knuckles blanch. “Well, I see no reason to stall any longer. Let’s begin, shall we?”

With a smile, he places his palm on the soft junction of her neck and shoulder. He can feel her quiver as well as the dampness of her skin and the taut, stretched muscles beneath. He draws a bit nearer, standing only a few inches away, and the ache inside of him coupled with her proximity pushes him into a thick, transfixing high. Static switches on and off inside his head; his thoughts come in bursts of _need want feel take closer mine mine MINE._

Biting back the rumble of a throaty groan, he tightens his grip and slides his other hand along the gentle curves of her side, hoping to assuage the sudden tumult. He shuts his eyes to press out the sight of her, to concentrate and collect his bearings.

Truthfully, he hadn’t expected this. He hadn’t expected the Itch to respond in such a violent manner when presented with a test subject in such close quarters. He knows that euphoria can be achieved through test completion, but what about this? Is it possible that he was purposely built to be receptive to human contact in this manner? He’s not sure, but it’s an interesting concept—a concept he has every intention of investigating.

“Just to let you know,” he says, framing her jaw with spindly fingers, “even though this is an experiment being conducted entirely for your benefit and eventual convincement, it turns out—surprise!—it’s also an experiment for me as well. Funny how things work out sometimes. Oh, but don’t be alarmed. I know that sounds a bit, you know, daunting, especially because experiments aren’t always, ah… safe, as it were. But just think about it for a second, all right? Here, look at it this way: it’s for _science_. That sounds better already, doesn’t it? Yeah, science always makes it sound better. Dangerous lasers? Science. Bottomless pits? Science without a doubt. Deadly turrets? Nope, still science. Mashy-spike-plates? Most definitely science. So, in the name of science, we’ll both get to experience the effects of what this can provide. We’ll be braving a new path for the betterment of everyone. Doesn’t that sound fantastic?”

He tilts her chin up so she can look at him, and he grins when he sees her determined expression falter, fear cracking through.

“Oh, yes. That’s good. And let me tell you, love—I’m really looking forward to the results.”

Twisting in the cables, she tries once again to lunge at him, revulsion burning in the depths of her eyes, but he sidesteps gracefully away with a mocking _tsk_.

“Well, you’re just full of energy, aren’t you?” He chuckles deeply with approval. “Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. Energy is good. Very good, actually. And you’re going to need a lot of it from what I gathered. I don’t actually know how hard this is on humans, if I’m honest. Never tried it before. So, do try not to let all that fight go to waste. Adrenal vapor only does so much. Oh, right, and just a note, a friendly little reminder: you won’t be getting out of that tangle anytime soon. I admire your tenacity, I honestly do, but it’s pointless to keep trying. So have a bit of a rest, yeah? Relax. Let Wheatley do all the work.”

Wheatley shifts around her and ghosts the tips of his fingers down the length of her spine. Visibly arching under his touch, her ribs expand with a sharp inhale and her limbs tremble in her bonds. He notes the way her skin prickles with tiny bumps, the fine hairs of her arms sticking on end, and he relishes how her hips roll in a jerky movement as she slumps back down, limp but not quite defeated.

He tenderly tucks a lock of dark hair behind her ear, making sure to draw it out into a faint sketch down the length of her jawline. “I’m just looking out for you, you know,” he murmurs, smoothing his hand down the front of her chest. His long fingers brush her breasts and he can see her shudder. “I take care of good test subjects. I really do. Except, of course, when they team up with a certain someone who will not be mentioned and plot my downfall and deactivation. But other than that, I’m actually a very good caretaker. I don’t ask for much. Just obedience. Cooperation is always appreciated. I’m a gentleman; I understand it’s hard sometimes, but really, is it so much to ask to do what I say?”

He has both hands running down the ladder of her ribs now, his thumbs tracing circles just along the sides. His teeth worry at his lower lip as he carefully watches her expression. Her mouth is a firm line, her eyes shut tight, and her brow is knitted with vexation. She seems torn, battling between two entirely separate desires, and it’s somewhat unclear as to which is winning.

“You know, I can’t help but notice your reluctance,” he remarks, and he shifts his hands upward to cup her jaws once again. He presses his upper body against hers as his legs nudge between her thighs, and he can feel her addicting warmth creep into every receptor. The Itch is a fire within him, sparking through every circuit and wire, a smouldering pulse in his belly, and he can feel himself begin to shake with her. “Starting to take it personally. Feeling a bit insulted. Is it because I’m not human? It is, isn’t it? You don’t think I have the necessary things for this, do you? You must think I’m too outdated. Yes, Wheatley’s model is too old for anything like this. He’s not good enough. He’s not advanced enough. Well, guess what? Think again.”

Subroutines trigger in the back of his skull, and the Itch abruptly intensifies. A torrent of need wracks through him, sharp and hard and aching, and in the onslaught he presses his hips against her lower stomach for support and suddenly everything feels so _delicious_ and he’s incapable of producing proper sound, his mouth a hub of static and jagged groans.

“Oh, god,” he whispers, finally able to recapture his voice. “God, I was… not expecting that.” His suit feels hot and entirely too tight, and he’s trembling against her, his hands gripping the base of her head, just below the knot of her ponytail. “Hah. Oh, man alive, do you feel that?” He grins, directing her gaze up at him with his thumbs beneath her jaws. Her eyes are half-open, glazed with something he can’t discern, but all he knows is that it meshes this feeling even deeper into the webs of his circuitry. “I can do this, love. Don’t doubt me. I’m going show you exactly what I feel, and then you’ll understand. I promise.”

With a nudge and tug from the cables, Wheatley leans her toward the side, better exposing her throat. His hands slide from her jaws to palm her ribs and tease the sides of her breasts, and when his mouth descends on the slope of her neck, he catches her skin between his teeth and gently pulls as he works a damp trail to her collarbone. It’s awkward at the start because of his height, but he eventually finds a good posture that he can maintain without too much strain, and so he continues to weave patterns with his teeth and tongue along her nape and shoulders.

This close, he can hear the steady thrum of her heartbeat in the hollow of her chest. He can feel it pulse beneath his hands as his palms coast up and down her sides, cupping her breasts, and he grins into her skin because the knowledge that she is _his_ ignites fire through every inch of his body. This much power is intoxicating; he can do anything he wants, anything, and all without repercussion. Who’s to punish him now? _Her_? No, not anymore. No, _he_ is in control, he has the answers to everything, it’s all there at his command, and everything in this facility is entirely and completely his. Especially her. Especially, especially her. God, and she’s going to listen to him and realize where she’s gone wrong, he just knows it, and then she’s going to test for him and make him feel good for the rest of her life. It’s perfect.

He drags his teeth across her collarbone, and she shivers underneath his mouth.

Yes. Completely, absolutely perfect.

_You’re taking away her freedom—_

Freedom? What freedom? She’s a test subject. She has no bloody freedom. She’s here to test and make science and—

_You’re going to hurt her—_

He needs her! Why would he hurt her now? Well, if she needs more convincing, he might hurt her a bit, but only just a little, just enough to make her see—

_She doesn’t want this—_

Shut up, shut up, he’s in charge, just him, not you, shut up and go away, you’re _ruining_ this—

_Something is wrong, you’ve got to listen—_

No, everything is FINE!

The platform beneath him succumbs to a series of sharp tremors, nearly knocking him off balance. The cables swing in the air, colliding with one another, and the noise inside his head flickers, dropping in and out, a mumble of static and nonsense. Wheatley snarls at the internal intrusion and bites along the soft plane of her neck, jaws pressing hard, and he can feel her flinch under his hands, under his chest, wincing with pain, and he resists the urge to laugh because this is his _right_ , he can do this, no one can tell him otherwise, no one, not even that stupid, insignificant, clawing voice. No, no one’s strong enough, intelligent enough, powerful enough; he’s the boss, _him_ , no one else, and in this place, in this facility, he is a _god_.

With a low chuckle in his throat, his hands slide lower, his thumbs mapping the lovely curves of her hips and thighs. He presses his mouth to her ear, his tongue tracing the outer shell, and he releases a slight exhale, delighting in the shiver that wracks through her, wracks through the entire chamber.

“Do understand now?” His fingers draw a tentative line down the muscle of her abdomen, meeting the thin material that still covers the place between her legs. “Do you know what I’m talking about? That feeling, that need, that… itch?”

He breathes against her earlobe, and when he feels wetness on his inquisitive fingertips, everything tenses inside of him, want and thrill twisting insatiably tight. He begins to trace slight circles there, the damp cloth bunching along, applying a subtle pressure that makes her squirm and thrash among the cables.

“Is it unbearable yet?” he asks. “Does it make you feel like you’ll die if you don’t get what you want? Because that’s how I feel. That’s how _you_ make me feel. When you leave me hanging, taking so long to finish a single test, taking your sweet bloody time, I just… it’s too much. It’s just too much. I feel like I’m going to die, and there’s sod all I can do about it because the system retaliates and shocks me if I so much as help you.”

He leans back just enough to allow himself a full view of her face as he continues those motions that seem to excite her so much. With half-lidded eyes, she stares at him in frustration, her mouth open and sucking in ragged breaths, the soft chamber lights setting the slick sheen of her skin aglow. He licks his lower lip at the sight and smirks.

“I can make you feel that too, you know,” he says. “Oh, there’s an idea for later. Another experiment, maybe. The effect of shocks on the human body. Might be worth looking into. But let’s just stick to this for now, yeah? Let’s see where this gets us. One test at a time.”

Wheatley begins to slide her underwear down to join the orange jumpsuit around her knees, his lips dragging across the lean slope of her stomach. When that last hindrance is pushed away, he kneels in front of her, his fingers caressing her inner thighs, feathery light, and his tongue traces a slight circle around her navel before eventually dipping lower. His breath is hot against her skin and the coarse hairs below, he makes sure of it, and just as she rolls her hips forward to encourage his advancement, he takes pause to look up at her.

Her muscles are twitching, her arms and calves wrapped securely in the bodies of thick cables. Her ribcage heaves with short, uneven inhales, and he notes the visible flush in her cheeks, the way her hair sticks to her temples, and the carnal rawness of her expression. Wheatley likes what he sees.

“Ah. Feeling it now, are we?” He grins triumphantly, running his tongue along his upper lip. “That’s good. That’s great. Glad to hear it, love. Oh, oh, but you know what? I just thought of something. Got a brainwave here. It’s brilliant. You’ll be impressed by this. Let me know what you think, all right? I know just the thing that’ll really get you going.”

He pulls back and runs a long, spindly finger along the external augments that enhance his vision, searching about the thin edges.

“Do you see these glasses? Remember them? Well, they’re sort of like glasses. They’re actually a bit more technical than normal human ones. Had to get them after She crushed me. Couldn’t see a bloody thing. Everything was just blots of white and black and other weird colors off the spectrum. It’s downright awful not being able to see, you know. And I’m sitting here thinking, well, she can’t see all that much from up there now, can she? Must be frustrating. I know I’d be frustrated if I were her.”

After a moment or two of flipping through various settings, he finally finds what he’s looking for.

“Ah, here we go. Boom, problem solved. Get a load of this.”

The black monitors spark to life. All at once, the room brightens in a flourish of blinding light, and then a crisp, clear image of her face is displayed on every screen. She makes a small gasping noise in the confines of her throat, her entire body tensing, and her eyes glance back and forth about the chamber, widened with what he assumes is surprise. Each image mimics her perfectly.

Wheatley laughs, running his hands gleefully down the lengths of her thighs. “Ta-da, it’s you! Fancy that, huh? See, I told you these were more technical. Got hundreds of features, tons of them, things you’d never even dream of, and this particular one just happens to be a camera feed. It’s a bit complicated in terms of technology and wiring and all that, hardly expect you to understand it, but it’s like this: anything I see pops onto those monitors just up there. Absolutely anything. Isn’t that brilliant?” He leans up and kisses her stomach, his nose pressed against the soft skin of her navel, and the images on the screens shift to accommodate the movement. “It’s great, isn’t it? I knew you’d love it. Now you get to watch everything. You get to see what I see. And that’s going to be extraordinarily helpful here soon.”

With a grin and another light kiss to her inner thigh, he brings a long, teasing finger into the wetness between her legs, pushing slowly inside but withdrawing in an instant when her hips roll forward. Satisfied with her response, he then begins to apply a soft pressure above with the pad of his thumb, circling around that place that seems to jolt electricity through her limbs, never truly touching, and her back arches into this shivering arc as if silently pleading for more.

Wheatley glances up, the monitors shifting once again, and he finds that loves the way her body looks as she quivers among the cables. She looks so helpless, so alone, so utterly _consumed_ , and he hopes with everything that it’s just as bad for her as it is for him. He hopes that that coiling inside that’s somehow delicious and painful and excruciating all at once is just as powerful and terrible and hungry as this thing inside of him. He hopes it’s eating her, too; he hopes it’s clawing at her brain and forcing her into submission, weakening that steel resolve, breaking apart any resistance she ever had. Just for a moment, he replaces his thumb with the warmth of his tongue, and he nudges two fingertips inside of her, just so, only enough to make her _feel_ what could happen, and the tentative thrust of her hips gives him all the information he needs to know: she’s crumbling fast.

It’s an understatement to say that Wheatley is enjoying this. In fact, he’s never felt so invigorated. To have this much power over someone so stubborn and infuriating—god, it’s marvelous. He has complete and total control, every last drop, and he can do anything he wants. He’ll sway her. He can make her bend. He knows it. A bit more of this perhaps, and she’ll finally understand. She’s got to understand; the tension between his legs is nearly insufferable.

A jagged gasp issues from her throat and she tries to push him farther in, straining her body forward, grasping, but he denies her the pleasure. Pulling away, he draws up to his full, towering height and places his hands on the curves of her hips, relishing the softness beneath his palms.

“So,” he says, pressing closer, “how are we doing? Getting uncomfortable? I can tell. You’re all trembly. It’s all right if you are, though. I’m a bit uncomfortable myself.” He leans in and nips her earlobe, moving flush against her, and the pressure of her stomach against that new tightness makes him twitch. “You see? We’re going to solve that, though. Together. The both of us. It’ll be great. You’ll test for me, I’ll get that feeling, that bloody amazing feeling, and everything will be fine.”

He kisses her jaw, his teeth gently pulling at the skin, and works a warm path toward her mouth. Smirking, he traces his tongue along her lower lip, his hands cupping her ass and pushing her into his hips. It sharpens the Itch to a dizzying degree, but it feels incredible, painfully incredible, centered right in that burning knot in his lower belly, and it takes all of his willpower to restrain the impulse to push her to the floor and ravage her until it reaches that peaking euphoria he’s been wanting so desperately.

Wheatley releases a shaky breath at the thought, hot against her mouth. “So, what do you think? You’ll help me, right? You know what I’m going through now. You can feel it. It’s all I ask. Just some more tests. You’re a clever girl. Be cooperative. Be a good test subject for me. I just—I need this. And you can give it to me. You can.” He rolls his hips against her and oh _god_ that friction—it shocks twists of pleasure through his sensors and why is he so receptive to this, why hasn’t he ever done this before— “Come on. What do you say? Just give me a yes. Or a nod. Since, you know, the talking thing seems a bit difficult for you. Anything.” He kisses her, nudging her lips apart with his tongue, and then—

And then pain feeds into him, sharp and digging and unbearable, and then he’s shouting and wrenching away, his hands clasped over his mouth.

“You… you _bit_ me! You actually… you actually bit me. God, I—I think I’m bleeding.”

Gaping in shock, he watches the dark fluid as it trickles into his cupped palms below his chin. Pain stings inside his mouth, welling and throbbing along his tongue, and reddened saliva pools around his teeth and down his lip. Swallowing, the bitter taste of copper on his receptors, he wipes his hands across the front of his suit in a sanguine smear.

He looks up at her, and instantly, he sees raw satisfaction etched into her expression: laughter in her eyes, a smirk turning her lips, victory plastered all over. Every screen in the room reflects her triumph back at him, smug and haughty and arrogant and _monstrous_ , and then rage is creeping along every wire, sinking into every process, the cables along his spine convulsing, the noise in his head a burst of static and fury—

How—how _dare_ she.

His gaze hardens with cool anger. “So. That’s how it’s going to be, is it? That’s how it’s going to be. Yeah, all right. Okay. Fine. Two can play at that. You don’t want to help Wheatley with his problem? You’d rather have a go at him when he just wants to make you understand? Well, that’s fine. I’ll make you wish you’d helped. You’re going to regret this, lady.”

The set of cords from his back coil beneath his legs and along his arms, pulling him gracefully into the air. The images of the monitors swing and shift with his movement, finally settling on her distant form when he sits himself back into his chair at the chamber’s center. She makes another feeble attempt to jerk free, but the bonds around her tighten and she’s suddenly yanked off the platform, her body a limp ragdoll amid the bulk of cables.

Wheatley steeples his fingers, lingering blood dripping down his wrists, and he watches her as she’s dangled over the yawning chasm of the bottomless pit below. Everything tremors beneath him; he can feel the facility groan in the vast depths below, pipes snapping and panels breaking and floors splitting down the middle, but he shoves the alerts into the back of the queue. Everything is fine. Absolutely, completely fine.

Slowly, he begins to direct her toward his little island in the abyss. The screens around him are an ocean of blue and white with her treading at the center. She’s the only thing he has yet to overcome; the one thing he has yet to overpower, to bend—but not for long.

He smiles, a drying drop of red settling just below his lip.

“Yes. Yes, you are _definitely_ going to regret this. Just wait, love. You’ll see.”


	5. Ruiner

A little anxiousness will do her good.

Yes, he thinks. Yes, anxiousness, and a little humility. That’ll fix her right up. She’s dealing with someone far greater than herself, after all. Who does she think she is to oppose him like this? She’s at his mercy, or lack thereof, and he wants every bit of her to know it. Test subjects aren’t supposed to bite their superiors.

_Test subjects aren’t supposed to be treated like this, either._

Treated like what? Treated like they’re inferior? He’s treating her like this because she _is_ , because she’s maddening and infuriating and refusing to do what’s been asked—

_She’s not because you’re barking mad and—_

No, he’s not, he’s _not_ , who are you to judge anyway, you’re just this stupid voice, small and insignificant and _annoying_ —

_You’re a bloody moron if you can’t see—_

Stop, shut up, shut up, he is NOT a moron, shut up and go away, no one asked you, no one invited you, no one wanted your bloody opinion—

_This is wrong, this is horrible, this is—_

This is _fine_.

When she’s delivered close, he leaves her suspended in mid-air, the bottomless pit a glowing maw below. The monitors depict a shaking canvas of her body: her skin is flushed, jumpsuit bunched around her knees, long fall boots useless. While her expression still rebellious, it’s no longer as smug as it was. Needless to say, it’s a satisfying sight. It seems as though she has enough sense to realize he’s serious.

Wheatley moves his tongue around his mouth, swabbing up the lingering taste of metal. Pain still whispers down his receptors, but it’s not as sharp as before. It seems the colonies of nanobots pumping down the cords from Her old chassis are doing their job at repairing the wound. He silently approves of their haste.

“So, it seems you’re pretty intent on being stubborn.” Wheatley makes a _tsk_ ing noise. “I was hoping you’d be more cooperative after I stimulated you a bit. You know, after giving you that feeling. You still feel it, don’t you? That itch? I know I do. It’s just excruciating, isn’t it?” He leans forward, one hand sliding up the length of his back, feeling among the cables. “Oh, but I’ve got a solution. For both things. It’s brilliant. I’ve got a few theories running up here. My body seems incredibly, ah, responsive, for lack of a better word, to the body of a human. I’ve never realized it before, but I’m thinking that maybe it’s just because all the proper things weren’t activated. You know, all the… the science-y, important stuff.”

He finds the cable he’s looking for, wraps his fingers around it, and tugs. A hissing noise can be heard as the sharp, silvern prongs disengage from the port column in his spine. His vision splits into snowy static for a moment, but it rights itself after a few seconds, and then he can see clearly again. The Itch seems to twist even tighter inside of him with the loss of the data feed, and his toes curl as he arches forward in his seat, his back taking the shape of a slender arc.

“ _Ahh_ ,” he moans, teeth sinking into his lower lip. The cable in his hand twitches, sparking. “Oh, wow. Yes, there we go, _there_ we go, that’s… that’s much better. Didn’t… didn’t really need that one. Right. Yes. That’s good.”

Wheatley fights off a series of shivers as he looks at her, still being dangled in the air just a few feet from his platform. He notes that she’s staring at him with something he can’t exactly discern. Anxiety, perhaps, or maybe hunger? Either way, it’s of no major consequence. As long as she’s not under the impression that she’s better, he’s plenty satisfied.

“Hm. Where was I? Something about theories.” Wheatley licks lips in thought. He can still taste the metal of his blood. It’s strangely pleasant. “Oh, oh, right, I remember. All the science-y important stuff seems to be taken care of now. Activated and all. I feel—I honestly don’t know what I feel. But I know I’m physically receptive to you. Mostly with this.”

With his other hand, he tentatively palms the stiffness between his thighs as it strains against the thin material of his white and blue patterned bodysuit. The pressure from his hand is delicious, and it takes all his strength not to cry out.

“Oh, wow,” he whispers. “I… I like that. I like that a lot.” He looks up at her again, taking in the smooth curves of her body; her hips, her breasts, her thighs. He feels an indescribable need to touch her, to map her entire frame with his fingertips and more, but he reins in the urge and quashes it into submission. This isn’t about her pleasure. This is about making her realize who’s in charge. He’s not about to let her off this easily. Maybe when she learns her proper place, he’ll think about allowing her a taste of what a finished test feels like for him.

Wheatley shuts his eyes and makes a satisfied humming noise, his hips hesitantly rising to meet the gentle touches of his hand. “It felt so good being against you, you know,” he murmurs. “Especially when I moved. The itch was stronger, but at the same time it felt like it was starting to reach that—that pleasure, you know? That feeling. That euphoria.” He runs his fingers up and down the sides, squeezing, and a light groan comes from somewhere inside his chest. “Oh, man alive, that feels bloody _amazing_.”

His body is twitching, legs apart and toes curled, and his hips give slight thrusts to further the pleasure burrowing into every receptor. God, he thinks; it’s incredible, so incredible, and it feels so good he’s not sure what to do other than to continue the jagged movements into his hand in hopes of prolonging that coiling, mounting, aching thrill. The feeling is gripping, intoxicating, addicting, and if he doesn’t get more, doesn’t get the shaking release he’s been seeking for so long, he thinks he might snap.

Glancing to the cable in his other hand, his lips spread into a wide grin. “I—I’ve got an idea. Going to try something. Going to try a theory here. Hang on a moment, yeah? Literally, though. Because you’re hanging. So don’t fall down or anything.”

He brings the port end of the cable to the collar of his suit and slips it under. He then wrenches it downward, the prongs ripping the thin material down the length of his chest and toward his stomach. The air is pleasantly cool to the exposed skin, and it feels even better when he’s able to relieve the painful tightness around his cock.

“Oh, yes, that’s better. God, yes, _yes_. So much better.” Breathing deeply, he curls his fingers around the base and drags them slowly upward, pleasure sharpening to an unbearable peak without release. His other hand grips the cable so tightly his knuckles start to blanch. “I told you before I can feel you,” he murmurs. “I can feel your skin, your sweat, all of it. I can feel it. But that’s only the outside.” He squeezes his cock and a jagged gasp finds its way out of his mouth. “I… I want to feel you from the inside. With every inch of this.” He hisses with another tight upstroke, his body wracking with a shudder. “With every inch of—of me.”

Wheatley can see her glaring at him from the tangle of cables. The monitors’ image share her blatant displeasure. She starts to move again, struggling with the strength of the black cords that keep her captive, but Wheatley tenses and everything constricts around her, forcing her immobile.

“Hey, you weren’t in such a hurry to die before,” he says, gesturing to the chasm below with a quick motion of his head. “What’s the rush? I just want to test. We’ll try this experiment and see what it’s like. Figure out these routines. That’s not so bad, is it?” He watches her lips part, baring her teeth into a feral snarl, and he releases a weary sigh, reluctantly pulling away from the hardness between his legs. “You’re bloody determined, aren’t you? You’ll probably bite me again if I let you get close. Can’t have that. Looks like we’re going to need some discipline. Some precautions. Let’s see…”

He glances about the room in thought. His eyes pass over the hull of Her chassis bolted into the ceiling, following down the lengths of the cords that slope down into his spine. Curiously, he looks down at the cable still held tightly in his hand. The end sports a grouping of sharpened metal prongs for fitting into designated ports. Harmless to him, of course, but her…

An idea begins to surface.

“Oh, I’ve got just the thing. C’mere, love.” With a smirk, he motions toward him with a long finger.

She’s brought forward on command. Now hovering just past the lip of his platform, long fall boots only a foot or so from the metal floor, she’s no longer in any immediate danger of falling to her death. Well, not that such a thing can’t be easily arranged should the need arise.

Wheatley rises and shrugs off the remainder of his suit. The spinal cables rip it straight down the back, and it falls into a tattered pool at his feet. He reaches out to her, tugging pensively at the jumpsuit around her thighs.

“Hm. Let’s get rid of all this first, though. It’s looking a bit cumbersome.” The cord in his hand twitches as he brings it closer to her skin, to the remaining clothes bunched about her legs. “Relax. It won’t hurt if you don’t move. Be still for me. You can do that, right? Be still.”

The straps of her long fall boots are cut first. The seams of her jumpsuit follow, and then the thin fabric of her underwear. He stares at her straight in the eyes, challenging her defiance as the cable rises from his hand and takes upon a will of its own. Lazily, it snakes its way about her neck, snug but not too tight, and the pronged end poises threateningly at her temple.

“If you make a single move,” he whispers lowly, his breath close against the curves of her mouth, “any move at all, anything against me, I won’t hesitate to send this straight through your primitive little primate brain.” The longest prong traces down a few inches, the end grazing the surface of her skin. A thin thread of red wells in its wake. “You see? You’re here at my leisure. I could kill you right now if I wanted. All this little fellow needs is a nudge from old Wheatley, just a word, a thought, and you’ll have another nice hole right through that pretty head of yours.” He grins, licking his upper lip. “Remember when I said I’d make you regret not helping me? This’ll make sure of it. Don’t make me keep that promise, love. You won’t enjoy it.”

He kneels in front of her, and the cords around her legs begin to loosen. With a slow carefulness, Wheatley removes her long fall boots and sets them aside. He pulls at her jumpsuit afterward, tugging it off from around her knees. He balls up the fabric and tosses it across the platform.

When she’s completely uncovered at last, he places his hands on her calves, his thumbs brushing over the white and red depressions in her skin from the pressure and shape of the boots. He gently strokes the soft flesh in the bends of her knees, feeling taut tendon rope over the joint, and then he slides down to massage her ankles. He can feel the bone roll underneath his fingertips, and it sends strange thrills up the length of his spine.

“Mm, you are perfect,” he says. “You’re going to be just lovely. Tremendous.” Cupping her feet, palms pressed against the soles, he kisses across the knobs of her knees. He trails upward, hands leisurely following suit, and he nuzzles his nose against her navel. “I’ve got a job for you,” he says. “Another test. Just a small one, though. Nothing major. I need you to show me you’re a good girl. Show me you can follow orders. If you can do that for me, we’ll see about forgetting all that biting business. Sounds good, yeah? And then that nasty cord around your neck will go away. Or at least it won’t be as close. Have to have some sort of precaution on account of the brain damage and all. Can’t be too careful.”

His hands frame the curve of her hips as he continues to nestle his head against her belly. It’s soft and warm, radiating a heady heat, and he wonders what it would be like to be inside of her, to do the things he’s read and thrust between her legs and sate this crawling, clenching feeling. If her outer temperature is any clue as to what she might feel like within, well, he can’t wait to find out.

Wheatley makes a faint sound of appreciation in his throat and looks up at her. “I don’t really want to hurt you, you know,” he says, his thumbs tracing her hip bones. “You just make things so hard for me. What else am I supposed to do when my only living test subject pops off the grid and tries to deactivate me and replace me with a bloody potato? I mean, seriously, that’s just not a very good situation for anyone, is it? But everything’s fine now. You’re here, you’re going to do this for me, I’m going to watch, and everything will be fine.”

He kisses her belly one last time before rising to his feet. Kicking aside the remnants of his bodysuit, he sets down in his chair and rolls his shoulders.

“All right,” he says. “Come on. Just a few steps forward. On your own now.”

She glances down at the platform, looking at her toes, and then she settles her gaze on him. Defiance is still present in the cool slate of her eyes, he notes, and the thin line of her pressed lips says volumes about her willingness to comply.

“Come on,” he says again, gesturing toward him with slight movements of his hands. “Not like it’s difficult. Your legs aren’t bound up anymore. Go on. Couple steps. Just up to the chair here.”

She glares back at him, eyes narrowed.

Wheatley sighs and rests his forehead against the heel of his palm. “Look, could you just be cooperative for once? It’s all I’m asking. Honestly. Just a little cooperation. Follow some commands, solve a few tests, grant some of that euphoria. Not hard. And you’re being exceedingly difficult. Do I need to show more discipline? Is that it? Show you some consequences? Because I’m being serious here.” His body tenses, and the cable around her neck tightens. “I’m not—” tighter, “—bloody—” tighter, “— _joking_.”

Gasping, she begins to thrash. She attempts to move her arms and wrench away the constricting cord, but she’s denied the ability. Wheatley tightens the bonds around her wrists, snapping her back into place.

“Am I being clear?” he asks, arching an eyebrow. “Am I making any sense? Any at all? Is this getting through? Because if it’s not, I’ll try something else to make sure it does.”

The port end of the cable shifts, and then it’s dragging across her shoulder, the longest metal prong piercing into her skin. A ribbon of red trails along just behind. It comes to a halt at her collarbone, blood beading at the tip. She’s shaking now, her entire body a bundle of quivering limbs. Expression contorted with agony, she brings one leg out, toes stretching, splayed apart, half-curled in pain, and she takes one tentative step forward.

Wheatley chuckles with approval. “Ah, that’s more like it. See, I knew you could do it. That wasn’t so bad, now was it?” The cable loosens, moving away from her collarbone and repositioning itself near her temple once more. “Now, come on, give us another,” he encourages. “Come up here with old Wheatley and we’ll take care of that smatter on your shoulder.”

It takes her several moments to walk to the center of the platform. Her trembling makes it difficult for her to move properly. When she finally stops in front of him, she slumps forward, seeming exhausted.

“That’s it. Good. Brilliant. Well done. Now stand still.” He sits on the edge of his seat and reaches out for her, one hand on her ribs, the other about her arm. He pulls her a bit closer and descends upon her neck, tongue tracing sloppy patterns across the dripping trail of red. It tastes sharp and metallic and bitter, somewhat weaker than his own, composed of fewer components, but it’s not entirely unpleasant. After the last of it is gone, he rubs his thumb thoughtfully across the wound. “Wow, got you a bit deep there, didn’t it? Quite a cut. It was necessary, though. Had to make a point. You understand, don’t you? It was necessary. Yeah. Necessary.”

Licking his lips, he moves his hands onto her shoulders and presses down, forcing her onto her knees. He shivers with anticipation as he watches her glance up at him, fear displayed plainly in the depths of her eyes. Smirking, he frames her jaws with his fingers and tugs her forward an inch or two more so that she’s level with the aching stiffness between his legs.

“All right, love,” he murmurs, thumbs tenderly brushing her cheeks, “here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to solve me. I’m declaring this a test, and you’re going to solve me. I want inside you. To feel you. Your mouth, your tongue, throat, everything. But no teeth. Got it? Understand? No biting. Seriously. I mean that. Or you’re going to find yourself in a situation we’re both going to regret. I don’t think I need to remind you.”

He grips her with one hand by the base of her skull, just above the coiled cable and her disheveled ponytail, and he pulls her toward his cock. With the other, he angles it toward her mouth, his teeth worrying at his lip in eagerness. The tip presses against her chapped lips, and after a few mock-thrusts coupled with tightening fingers through her hair, he slides inside.

Wheatley finds himself shuddering and his back arches as his processors try to cope with the sudden rush of sensations throttling him. His thoughts are jagged and distorted, static welling under his skull, and all he can think is how _wet_ everything is and how _good_ the heat feels and how he wants so badly to move and fuck her mouth but he’s rendered immobile by the onslaught, a wreck of disjointed processes and shivering limbs. He bites back a cry when he feels her start to suck.

“Oh, god,” he manages, his voice trailing the vowels into a throaty moan. “God, this is—I wasn’t… oh, this is _tremendous_.”

After a few moments of incoherent strings of jumbled not-quite-words, he manages to regain control of his body. Moving his hips, he begins with short, shallow thrusts, desperate and pleasure-hungry and wanting so much more. The friction and the pressure reduce him to nearly nothing, only the basic, primitive functions required for activation and movement, and he feels like he’s being dismantled from the inside out, and _god_ , it’s one of the best things he’s ever felt in his entire life. Knotting his fingers in her dark hair, he feels her tongue against the length of him and the undulating motions of her sucking mouth and it’s so _good_ but it’s just not enough, not yet enough, he needs more, and so he increases the pace and doesn’t even bother to swallow the groans rumbling from his throat.

“Don’t—don’t stop,” he breathes, roughly cradling the back of her skull. The cables along his spine twitch and spasm with his tensing body, the data feeds becoming a stream of unintelligible symbols and undefined values flashing across his field of vision. One of his compilers seems to have stopped functioning properly; he can’t understand the flow of information from Her chassis and the systems of the facility anymore. At one point, he might have cared, might have strived to solve the problem, but the Itch is too strong, too insistent, too _close_ , and it’s afire through every circuit, wire, port, wrenching him forward, forcing him to try to sate this commanding feeling that’s consuming him whole.

Her mouth feeds both pleasure and pain. Helpless and at the mercy of her tongue and lips, every movement brings him that much closer, but no matter how much it feels like he’s almost there, just within reach of that euphoria, so close, nearly there, that dam just refuses to break. He’s a gasping mess with damp palms and curled fingers and failing protocols and he just doesn’t understand; he’s so fucking hard and it hurts and he just wants to feel that release, that sharpening zenith, that rush of complete pleasure that he can lose himself in, but it’s not happening, it’s not, and he’s just so frantic and lost and—

“ _Please_.” He’s whispering, chanting, light and quick and threadbare, pushing everything to make his voice work. “Please, please, I need this, _need_ this. Let me—let me have it. God, please, let me have it. I— _ahh—_ ” His words dissolve into a gravelly groan and he bites into the soft flesh of his cheek as he feels the heat retreat. Through squinting eyes, he can see her lips frame the head of his cock, her tongue stroking across the very tip, every monitor in the room a perfect replica of her flushed face.

In that instant, everything suddenly spikes. His senses heighten into the extreme, dizzying and amplified by an unknown coefficient, and he can feel her and the facility and the damage and his mind struggles to push it all aside. He gets that _taste_ , a single drop, rocketing through each receptor, a prelude, and then he’s shouting because then it rolls forward in full force, planting shivers at the base of his backbone and rushing through the cables into every inch of him, pushing, swelling, _consuming_. He’s lost control and his hips move on their own accord. The tension uncoils to the rhythms inside his chest, sweet and aching and strong, and he feels the entire facility succumb to shaking tremors with him as he comes undone.

Wrapped in the aftermath of the enthralling high, he slumps forward, spent, and he settles his hands on her small shoulders. His grip is tight as his processors struggle to cope with the physical repercussions of the overdose of solution euphoria. He can feel her breathe, moving beneath his palms, and the static flickering beneath the casing of his skull seems to still for a single, lucid moment.

Fear sluices him over, rushing cold.

What has he _done_?

“Oh, god,” he says, cupping her jaws. He’s shaking, trying to make her look at him, but her eyes are cast to the floor and her expression is stoic, chilled, broken. He feels a pang of deep, twisting revulsion. How could he have done something like this?

Wheatley kneels on the ground with her, encompassing her shoulders with his thin arms, and he presses his cheek into the soft, matted mess of her hair. He wants to say something comforting, something apologetic, something to let her know that he never meant any of this, it’s not just him, he’d never want to hurt her, _never_ , he’d never do that, but he just can’t make his mouth form the words. It’s locked down, blocked by something Else, and he clenches his teeth as he tries to coerce his processors into accepting the commands, but nothing works.

And then the Itch returns.

He’s wrenched into its claws, vulnerable and helpless. The static returns in ripples and he can’t think straight. Everything’s muddled, incoherent, and all of his misgivings are suddenly shoved into the depths of that swelling blackness that’s creeping inside, scratching its way beneath every limb, every circuit, every thought. He’s thrashing, fighting back, but it’s no longer him; he has no control.

“That… that was wonderful.” His lips twitch into an avaricious smile. Tightening his grip around her jaws, he forces her to look at him. The weakness he sees there lurking in the slate of her eyes causes a triumphant laugh to well up from inside. It’s obvious: he’s done it. He’s actually done it. She’s finally broken.

Wheatley traces a thumb tenderly down her temple, tracing the cut from her neck-cable’s sharp prongs. “Really, though. I do mean that. Well done. Couldn’t have done it better myself. But as successful as that was, I think I’d like to try another.”

More cables string down from Her chassis, slithering around the lean shapes of her legs.

_Stop this, stop this, stop this—_

“You know.”

_She was your FRIEND—_

“For science.”


	6. I Do Not Want This

The noise inside his head grows louder.

It’s an amalgam of whispers, data feeds, numbers, and static-white. Everything is starting to break down. Strings of errors keep popping up, garbled and spliced pieces of code, _alert alert_ , but he shoves them all to the bottom, the back of the line, the lowest priority. Everything will be fine. He’s not going to concern himself with things like that when he has this limp test subject in front of him and the power to make her do whatever he wants.

And he _can_ do anything he wants now, can’t he? He can make her give him the pleasure he so desperately needs. Everything’s worked so perfectly. Just as planned.

“So,” says Wheatley, soaking in the sight of her, “let’s get you off your knees. You’ve been a good girl, haven’t you? Solved me. Listened. Behaved. No more biting. I think that’s enough to warrant a bit of a rest, don’t you? Maybe loosen that pesky cable around your neck? Well, not that you have any say in this. Or any say at all, really. But you’ve earned a little reward for being amazing so far. So, c’mere. Let me give it to you.”

Wheatley grins and brings her bulk of cables closer. They have her suspended just above his chair, holding her by the ankles, the hips, the thighs. She’s hanging just close enough for him to reach out and cup her calves, and he indulges himself by palming them and rubbing his thumbs down the tough muscle, trailing down to her ankles and the soft undersides of her feet. The Itch is climbing down his spinal column and tightening so hotly between his legs; he has to control it but it’s starting to eat away at him again, ravenous and greedy and a pulsing rhythm of _more more want take more MORE MORE_.

Focusing. Focus. Has to focus. It’s sharp and pulling his receptors apart but he has to focus.

He begins by kissing the tops of her knees. He tugs her toward him, closer, letting his tongue drag up her thighs. His hands climb up the plane of her back and dig in, slowly sloping down to cup her ass. Mouth at the juncture of her thigh and groin, he’s kissing, nibbling, tasting the salt and the sweat off her body. His cock is still hard, still engorged, still aching, so full, and he wants to grab her by the hips and shove her down onto him, but he resists the temptation. Instead, he moves his attention to the temperature of her body; her warmth, how it spreads throughout her legs, her hips, centering in molten heat just between. He tries to focus on what it will be like when he’s finally bringing himself inside her, of what the euphoria will feel like when everything clicks just right and the solution pumps in.

The static in his head hiccups. Feeds are screaming at him now, routing to the chamber: “WARNING: REACTOR CORE IS AT CRITICAL TEMPERATURE.”

“Again? Seriously? You’re ruining this.” With a jerk of his arm, a cable spools out from the chassis and crashes into another monitor. It cracks, the image of her splintering apart into shards of glass, and chunks of its frame unhinge and plummet into the abyss below. He kneads his temples, frustration sparking amongst his circuits. “Constantly talking, talking, talking. Does anything ever just _shut up_ around here?”

He glances up at Chell, chin resting on her soft, warm belly, and the other monitors reflect his vision. The room is an ocean of her face; flushed, mouth parted, sucking in hitched breaths of air. Need rockets through him, rooted in the base of his spine. The desire to shove into her resurfaces again, but he grits his teeth and wills it back.

“Well,” he manages, “besides you, of course. You’re not exactly the talkative type. Brain damage and all. But you know, I like that. I do. I really do. An admirable quality. Right up there with button pushing. Not the brain damage, the not talking. You… you give me room to think. Not like everything else in this place. You’re perfect. Beautiful.”

Wheatley leans back in, lips grazing her skin, and continues his leisurely pace. He revels in the knowledge that she’s going to test for him, to give him this rigid pleasure that he craves so badly, and the weight of that knowledge settles into his skull and pulls down through his limbs.

_This is wrong, this is wrong—_

“Shut up,” he breathes against her thigh.

_Why are you doing this, this is wrong—_

“Damn it, _shut up_ , no one’s asking you.”

_She was your friend, why are you doing this, you promised to get her out, you promised, you promised, why are you DOING this—_

“Stop talking! Just… stop. Stop. Just stop. I’ve had enough. It’s always whispering, isn’t it? Always. Talking, talking, talking, always fucking talking. SHUT UP!”

His voice surges throughout the facility, routing into every room. The floor quakes beneath his chair and some of the panels on the ceiling groan, metal shifting under strain. There’s a burst of that white noise again and there’s a fire somewhere underneath the facility, burning, smouldering, roiling up and climbing through the floors so down far below, but he ignores it. He’s in control. No one else. The facility is fine. It’s _fine_.

And yet, Wheatley is reeling. He grips onto her far harder than he should. His mouth gapes, tongue just barely against her, hot breath unfurling. His cock is so hard, throbbing, and it takes all of the power in his processors to shut out the impulse to crush her close, to have her hovering over him so he can push himself inside her.

“Well, that was… a bit of an outburst.” Wheatley glances up to see her face, and he notes that there is a very real expression of worry dimpling her brow. “Oh, but don’t be alarmed. All right? I’m not angry with you, love. Not at all. I just get so—bloody— _tired_ —of listening to… to everything. There’s just so much happening right now. Well, not that you can see it. It’s all behind the scenes. Technological stuff. Science and all. You understand. But don’t worry, don’t worry. Just relax. Relax, yeah? I’m going to take care of you. You’ve been good to me. Solved me. And well done there, I might add. That was tremendous. It felt so good. God, just… being in your mouth. Feeling you. Feeling everything. You felt so bloody amazing, I…”

Wheatley brings his mouth between her legs, breathing ragged, exhaling against the wetness and the heat. His tongue parts his lips and as he gives her a leisurely lick, everything spikes. She arches into him; the sweat, the salt, the chemicals, the cells of her skin, the hormones and the slickness and—

“I want to feel you here,” he breathes, right against her. “I want to feel what you’re like… right here.” A long finger has guided her folds aside, pressing softly, and his fingertip presses in, just barely. “Oh, man alive. You’re _dripping_. God. You’re absolutely soaked. You’re… you’re so very wet, fucking hell.”

His cock is twitching, anticipation and need seeding through every process, every thread. Even though he’s in complete control and has the power to make her do whatever he wants, here he is, sitting before her, her legs spread, his mouth so close, and he wants to tease her until she’s begging to be solved. He wants to make her feel like him. He wants her to ache and twist and need. He wants to instill this Itch inside of her. He wants her to suffer.

The flat of Wheatley’s tongue glides over her clit. He can feel her buck against him and he takes the opportunity to shove her against his face and bury his mouth between her legs. He begins to swirl his tongue around that bundle of nerves, his finger pushing further in, and he feels the sweat as it drips down her back and the uneven breaths she’s forcing and _fuck_ he wants to drive himself into her so fucking bad but he resists, he _has_ to resist, it’ll be soon, it will, and so he hums into her flesh and lets her rock against him as he pleasures her. Her taste is flush with every receptor, running down his tongue; the muscles in her hips and legs tighten as her thighs press against his ears, and he fucking _loves_ it. When he curves his finger and starts to thrust, he can feel her clench around him and an absolutely wonderful sound makes its way out of her throat.

“Ah, well, well,” he murmurs, hot against her skin, “so you’ve got a voice in there somewhere after all. Hiding it all this time, were you? No reason to, you know. Could’ve made things easier. Could’ve made things a _lot_ easier, actually. Still, that was… ah, I liked that. I want you to do it again.”

Wheatley grins against her, tongue lathering up and down along her skin in a gradual rhythm. A sharp intake of air pulls through her body and she’s wracked with a convulsing shiver as he pushes his finger as deep as he can go. Her legs have hooked onto his shoulders, coaxing him closer with her heels digging into the plane of his back, cables jerking, and the satisfying squeeze of her against him funnels a thick surge of _want_ down his spine.

“Come on,” he urges, leaving an open kiss with every vowel. “Come on, now. Do it again. Moan for me. Make some noise. I know you can. Can’t hide that from me now, love, so don’t go thinking about bottling up again. I want you screaming.”

Chell writhes under his touch, and a breathy gasp jerks from her mouth. While it’s more than before, it’s not enough, it’s not what he _wants_ from her, and so he draws out his finger, sucking at the sensitive juncture between her legs, and then plunges back in and starts a hasty rhythm she tries to meet with trembling desperation. Voices are swelling in his head, mashes of words in between bursts of loud static, compliments, fantasies, wants, _needs_ ; god you’re good, come on now, you can do it, you want this, I know you do, I’m letting you have it, come on, thank me, tell me you’re grateful, tell me you love it, tell me you want me, tell me you’re mine, tell me, _tell me tell me tell me god bloody scream for me TELL ME TELL ME SCREAM_ —

Her backbone arcs in a sudden snap. Her heels have shoved him fully against her, his nose flush with the thick coarseness of her hair, and _god_ he can _smell_ her, what kind of insanity is this, why does she smell so _good_ , but he has to focus, he _has_ to, he’ll lose it if he doesn’t, and so his mind latches back onto what’s happening with his hand. She constricts along the length of his finger, pressing along the receptors buried underneath his skin; she’s absolutely soaked, pulling him in and pushing him out with every thrust, and then his tongue must have done something particularly nice because a ragged jumble of sounds tear from her, stringing out into a long, punctuated moan— _ohh, yes, yes, yesss, god, be a good girl, come on, moan for me, come for me_ —and then everything inside her convulses in a delicious way. Sucking and flicking his tongue, he shoves another finger in to meet her rocking hips and clenching muscles, _oh god yes you’re so wet fucking come for me_ , and there’s a moment where her voice sharpens to a near keen and his entire body absolutely exalts. The pressure from her thighs against the sides of his head is almost too much to bear, but everything else surpasses it, he doesn’t care about pain, it doesn’t matter, his test subject is fucking his fingers at his desire, and so he suffers it through and works her until she’s panting and spent.

Wheatley lets her fall limp against him, her hips sagging down and her knees resting on his bare shoulders. One arm around her thigh, he breathes against her and gives another lick with the flat of his tongue before drawing away. Her body is a shaking mess; she quivers against the synthetic skin of his chest in the aftermath, pulling in thin inhales through her diaphragm, and he finds he has to adjust the cables’ strength to provide her proper support.

“Mm. That was it, wasn’t it? It was. That’s what it was for you. That was solution euphoria. I’m right, aren’t I?” Submerged in a heady haze, he gazes at the continuous wall of monitors stretching about the room. They all show her legs spread apart, dripping wet, and it just makes the painful stiffness between his legs that much more unbearable. The feeling is there, hot and desperate and hard, and it’s engulfing everything. “Ha, that’s… that’s good. That’s incredible. Tremendous. So, turns out we really can replicate it. And fairly well, if I might add. You were—oh, you were all shivering and… and wet. God. Good to know. Yes. Ah, very good to know. Hah. Right, okay, so, data point? Logged. Fantastic.”

Wheatley runs his hands along the length of her legs, leaving small, soft bites along the smooth surface of her inner thighs. When he reaches the knobs of her knees, he gathers himself and leans backward in his chair, cables pressing tightly against his shoulder blades. One must have jostled the wrong way because a clout of white slams through his vision before flickering in spiky patterns of noise and nothing. After it finally rights itself and can see again, a convulsion arcs through him. The plane of her stomach glistens with sweat, diaphragm heaving, and the lean muscle of legs sports damp trails from where his mouth has been. The knowledge that he’s made her this way, that he’s made her this awful and trembling mess, that he’s made her use her _voice_ , it all surges through his processors in a violent rush and shoving through his circuits and then he’s gripping at the armrests of his chair, hunched and reeling, sucking in gasps of air he doesn’t even need.

“All right,” he breathes. A sculpted canine pinches at his lower lip as he gazes up at her. “All right. Well, hope you’ve had a moment to recover. You know, get some of that energy back. You’re going to need it. I’m tired of waiting and the itch’s not going to get any better by just sitting here. It’s getting worse, actually. A lot worse. And as much as I wish I could… ah, _satisfy_ it on my own, I can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. Was rather disappointing. Lot of buildup and nothing else, if you can believe that. Well, probably. You probably can believe that. Wouldn’t exactly be in this position, now, would you?”

The serpentine coils attempt to help her back onto her feet, but her muscles fail her and she instead slumps to the floor, knees buckled and back hunched forward. Through his augments, Wheatley drinks in the lines that draw her collarbone and the shapes of her shoulders and the gentle curves of her breasts.

She really is beautiful. It’s almost a shame her life must be devoted to testing.

“Shut up,” he growls underneath his breath. “I know you’re still there. Go _away_.”

_Listen, please—_

“Thought I just told you to get lost.”

_You have to listen—_

“No, I really don’t.”

_She doesn’t WANT this—_

With a violent tremor, he shoves the voice down below through the webs of tasks and strings of code. He doesn’t know why it keeps coming back. It should have been smashed out and erased long ago; he’s run so many commands to get it _out_ , but no matter what he does, it just refuses—what a stubborn little wretch—and so he’s stuck with this tiny burning ember inside of him, refuting everything he does, and it just spurs the bouts of static behind his eyes and makes things so bloody _difficult_.

The only thing he wants is to test. That’s it. That’s everything. Well, that and more of the euphoria. Two things: testing and euphoria. That’s all he really wants. God, he wants it so bad.

“I—I need…” Fighting off the crawling cacophony inside of him, Wheatley clenches his jaws and flexes his fingers along the armrests of his chair. “I really do need a test subject for this. It’s impossible without one. If it _were_ actually possible—hypothetically speaking, of course, since it’s not—you wouldn’t have much of a purpose. Or any purpose at all. In fact, you’d probably be dead. You know, since I trapped you here. And took away your little portal gun. So, if I were you, I’d act a little grateful that you’re such an integral part in this, ah, process.”

Wheatley wills the cables to cradle her crumpled form off of the floor and bring her to her feet. The bulk of them are wrapped securely around the bends of her arms and the muscle of her calves and around the jutting bones of her ankles. As they coax her closer, he lets them loosen, but only just a touch. He doesn’t want her to wriggle herself free by any means, but he doesn’t dare critically injure her. He _needs_ her.

“So, hey,” he says, “while you’re hanging there, just thought of something.” The noise in his head is spiking again, climbing up into a thick mess of what might be voices or error strings or some of the data feeds he stopped processing a while ago, but he tries to push it all aside and _focus_. “Slightly off-topic, just a little, still in the realm of gratefulness or, well, _un_ gratefulness, but here it is: you never answered me before. Well, not that you actually can. Or can you now? You seemed rather eager just a bit ago.”

He pauses a moment to give her ample time to respond, but when she makes no effort short of a glare, he continues onward with a shrug.

“Still nothing, then? No, that’s fine. It’s fine. Really. Don’t strain yourself. Don’t want you all worn out or anything. Still, though, point is, you never answered. Oh, but don’t worry, I won’t take it too personally. Not like you’re out and about, talking to everybody else in the facility except for me. Not exactly an option. Mostly because they’re all dead. Minor detail.”

The cables hoist her upward a good foot or two. She’s suspended in the air, the soles of her feet hanging up above the floor. She’s about level with him now; her eyes seem tired and worn, but there is a harshness there, lurking down underneath. Drawing in a breath, Wheatley extends his hand to brush the side of her cheek. Her skin is hot and sticky, but he doesn’t mind. It’s proof of his accomplishment with her. It’s proof that he’s in charge, that he can give and take; that she is completely and totally his.

“Anyway, getting back on track. I’ll ask you again. Do you understand what I’m going through now?” His index finger traces a light line down the contours of her jaw. The uncomfortable twist of her body among the coils triggers a rough shiver down his arm. “Do you know what it’s like for me? That… god, that feeling. It’s so good. It’s so bloody good. It’s like someone’s pushing every little pleasure point inside you, you know, every one, ones you didn’t even know you had, all of them, constantly, all until you’re ready to just… explode.”

Chell doesn’t reply, but he expects that. All she’s ever been is silent and stubborn and infuriating.

What he doesn’t expect is for her to nod.

For a moment, he has trouble parsing the gesture. What? She moved her head? What does that mean? What sort of primitive type of communication is that? He thinks the problem might be something sparking somewhere in his internal coding, or perhaps it’s a hiccup in the connections to one of the many databases at his disposal, but he’s not positive. Come to think of it, he can’t access some of those files anymore. Hasn’t been able to in a while, actually. Has one of them gone down?

“Oh,” is all he can manage. The facility beneath wracks with another shuddering quake; fires are starting to crawl further and further up, but it doesn’t register. Another second passes by, information starts to flow again, and then, “Oh, right. Good. Brilliant. Good, glad to—glad to hear it. That you understand. That will make things a lot easier.”

Somewhere down below, things are breaking apart. Structures collapse; steel bends and snaps, panels crack and collapse, test chambers split into fissured fractures. The inferno at the facility’s center is threatening to consume the entire slew of lower levels, but that’s not something he can concern himself with right now. Everything will be fine. It _will_. It _must_.

“So, you know what I’m going through. You know what this feels like. You understand. Took you long enough, didn’t it? I mean, wow. You are stubborn. Too stubborn, really. I do appreciate some of your qualities—testing purposes and all of that, technical things, no real need to explain—but god, it’s about bloody time you got it. It’s like… ah, something or other about shoving square objects through round holes.”

The pads of his thumbs brush along her cheekbones. There are little imperfections here and there: gentle sweeps of charcoal underneath the crescents of her eyes, small indentures of worry lines across her forehead, beads of perspiration collected by her ears and temples. She’s human, mortal, flawed, and yet somehow that doesn’t dampen her appeal. It’s maddening because the Itch is burrowing through him, hollowing him out and pouring _want_ through his bones, and she’s now so submissive and close and he wants this so _bad_.

“I’m going to be honest,” he says, suppressing a shiver. “You were pretty difficult there for a while. You know, with the whole scheming and plotting and avoiding being killed nonsense. Put a thorn in my side. Well, not a literal thorn. Don’t… I don’t actually think that’s possible. I mean, yeah, I’ve got flesh, but there’s a lot of metal under all this. Tough stuff. Thorns aren’t very good at—uh, anyway, you came around! Smart move. Due to my expert convincing, obviously. Was a smart move, though. Really, it was. I’m not kidding. I would’ve preferred to skip the whole bloody thing and just get straight to the testing, but the roundabout way has been rather… rewarding so far.”

His thumb and forefinger shape her cheek and jaw as the rest of his hand splays across her face and into the dark, messy strands of her hair. It’s never quite occurred to him until now, but seeing her here, tangled up in a slew of the chassis’s cables, exposed and vulnerable and pictured endlessly around the chamber, she somehow seems so _small_.

“Look, love.” Wheatley guides her to look at him, fingers easing along her neck, just above where the security-cable has snaked its way around. “Here it is. I’ve made you feel what I feel. And I’d say that went over rather well, if I’m honest. Your reaction was—well, splendid, for lack of a better word. Absolutely splendid. I liked doing that to you. Loved it. I loved having you in front of me and just… giving you the itch and _satisfying_ it for you. I’ve got that power. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I think you’ll agree.”

He runs his tongue along the back of his teeth. He’s close enough to see sweat and pores and soft lashes. Her eyes are chips of ice staring back at him, peeling him apart from all edges of the room; there’s revulsion in there, and fear and hatred and anger, but all he can see is succumbing weakness.

“But listen,” he continues, “all right? Listen. As much as I hate it, you’ve… I need you. You can satisfy this. You can. And now I’d like to make us both feel good. I want this for the both of us. Well, mostly me because this itch is just—it’s killing me, all right? I’ll be honest. It’s killing me. It really is. But everything will be fine, yeah? It’ll be fine. It’ll be perfect. You’re here now. You’ve been good. You have. You’ve been a good test subject. Well, after some convincing, of course, but that’s all right, what’s past is past. I’ll forgive you for being so bloody difficult. Wheatley’s a good caretaker, after all. Really, what’s a little punishment without some mercy to smooth it all over?”

Wheatley leans in close, drawing in a heavy breath. He can still smell her; she lingers on his fingers and along the edges of his mouth and down his chin; the thought of what’s to come is nearly enough to make him shudder. She still inhales like she can’t quite suck in enough oxygen, quick and shallow, and with the scent of her and the sweat down her skin and her warmth so close, he draws in and kisses her.

She’s so very soft. It shouldn’t make everything inside him stop functioning, but it does, and Wheatley soon find himself pressing at her throat, her cheek, struggling to try to run the appropriate commands to restart all of the critical processes that tend to the facility once again. He pulls away with a gasp, and the Itch reignites with a hot burst.

“You’ll let me have this,” he murmurs, low and threadbare. “You will. You’ll let me. Please, god, let me. I… I need it. Or I’ll keep my promise. You do remember that, right? What I promised. I said I’d put another hole through your head. You remember your little friend there right ‘round your neck, yeah?”

To jog her memory, he lets it tighten. Not enough to become painful, but enough to make its presence well known. The pronged end dances a slow waltz by her temple, close and intimate, and yet not quite touching. The muscles in her throat work with a labored swallow, her skin glistening under the harsh overhead lights of the chamber, and as a wrenching twist of heat punches through him, Wheatley decides he’s nearly at the breaking point.

“So, I guess what I’m saying is…” The cords from the chassis lift her forward, tugging her closer among coils of thick black casing; a smirk curves the corner of his mouth and there is a press of elation through circuitry and wires. “Don’t test me. Ha, I mean, that’s my job now, isn’t it? I give you tests and you complete them. I’m the one testing you, not the other way around. In other words, what I’m getting at is there’s absolutely no point in fighting me. Not only do I have all the cards, you’ve got your hands tied. Literally.”

At his command, Chell is snaked forward into his lap. The bodies of the coils still keep her arms tucked taut where she can’t entertain the thought of striking him. Her legs spread to drape around his hips; the radiating heat from her comes flush with his erection and it takes every conscious process thread inside of him binding together to prevent himself from shouting. Wheatley bites into his tongue, the pain smoothing out over sensors and nerves, and it somehow dims the Itch and shoves it back from its sharpening ascent. Cables convulsing down his spine, he grips her thighs far too hard and revels in the softness of her skin. He’s compelled to reach down and touch her again, but he resists. He’s been generous; he’s let her have her turn. Now it’s his.

“All right,” he says, gritting his teeth. “All right. So, I know you can feel that. Sort of obvious with… well, everything. It’s—hah, it’s what we’re going to be working with. Test-wise, like earlier. Your mouth was bloody amazing. It really was. But here—” He rocks his hips, grinding against her; the friction is too sweet, too addicting, too incredible, and he sinks his teeth into the flesh of his tongue again to keep from moaning, “—god, you’re so… so _hot_ and wet.”

Wheatley’s sight flickers out again. He’s not sure whether it’s due to the cords fitting wrongly in the ports down his backbone as he presses against the chair, or whether his augments are starting to go, but everything sinks into a static-blackness and no amount of signals to refresh or reconnect seem to correct the problem. A distant part of him grows very concerned; the chamber shakes again, enough to feel the rumble through the platform beneath him, and somewhere down below the fires warp and melt and consume.

_You need to stop this—_

Go away, he’s busy right now, can’t you just—

_But the facility, please, it’s going to—_

Nothing! There is nothing wrong, everything is perfect, why do you insist on ruining this—

_You’re going to kill us both—_

Us? Who’s us? You don’t even exist, you’re worthless, you’re a moron, why are you still bloody here—

_For god’s sake, please, just listen—_

“Oh, sod off,” he growls, and he shoves his face against Chell’s neck before clamping down in a rough bite.

The soft noise she makes throttles through him in a surge through his circuits and it somehow jars his vision back into working order. Sucking on teeth marks and watching her flesh fill the menagerie of monitors, he cups her rear with one hand and presses her hips as close against him as he can get her. With the other, he climbs up the curve of her back and feels along her shoulder blades, her vertebrae, the dips and plateaus that shape her body in a latent sort of hunger. Perhaps it’s the thick bulk of the coils around her limbs or the vast, open expanse of the Lair, or even if it’s just his generous size in comparison, but he’s reminded that as far as test subjects go (not that he’s necessarily had any others), she’s… well, rather tiny.

As he kisses the red mark on her neck and rocks feverishly into her hips, delicious wetness slicking down the girth of his cock, it occurs to him somewhere in the back of his mind that according to the things he’s read, this tininess might pose a problem. He’s… well, he’s not exactly the smallest model. There are plenty of small and compact models, and he is definitely not one of them. He’s actually very tall, and despite his lanky appearance, he’s also very heavy. Something about the engineers’ experimentation with metal alloys. One of the benefits of being a part of the earlier generations of androids—not that he’s bitter or anything.

“Ah, before we get underway here,” he says, trailing a last set of kisses along her collarbone, “I just wanted to bring something to your attention.”

He runs his fingers up her ribcage, wondering just how much skin he can cover with his palms. It shouldn’t, but the fact that both of his hands absolutely engulf her has him awestruck. He doesn’t know why he’s never noticed it before. After all he’s done for her and after all the time they’ve spent together, it’s a wonder he’s never recognized the reality of just how small she is.

“Okay,” says Wheatley. He rubs delicate circles along the backs of her shoulders as he nips at the inner flesh of his cheek. “Right. Okay, well, to be perfectly honest, your size—ah, lack of size, actually, if we’re being technical—is different from mine. It’s sort of a drastic difference. Very drastic. Not that I’m too terribly concerned. I mean, it’s not a huge deal in the whole testing initiative. But let’s make this clear: you _are_ my only test subject, and you _are_ rather small. If you hadn’t noticed. So we’re going to make some adjustments to make sure I don’t have to go rooting around for new ones.”

Gently, coaxing her against his chest with his hands on her spine, he grinds against her, relishing how she feels. Everything is so close, it really is, all he needs to do is just _lift_ her and shove himself in, that’s all, everything will be fine, he’ll get to feel the euphoria again, but he reins in the compulsion and smashes it as best he can.

“I don’t want to—well, I don’t want to crush you in the process,” he admits, light and breathy against the shell of her ear. “Going to be honest, I sort of… ah, need a little help when the euphoria happens. I mean, it’s so much, you know? A bit hard to deal with. Support is nice. Like the chair here. So, just to give you the proper picture, we’ll be testing here, like this. With you right here on… on top of me. And I—I know you’re small, that’s fine, we’ll… ah, if I deem it necessary, we’ll try a bit slow. Testing and all. Got to figure things out first.”

Sliding his hands along beneath her thighs for better purchase, he works his joints and slowly starts to lift her. The cables coil together and offer their strength to help draw her up. Slickness drips down soft skin and he finds that the anticipation has become crushing; it gnaws at his inner workings and wires, curling too closely on the undersides of the metal shell beneath his flesh, and the swelling noise inside his head makes it more and more difficult to focus.

“I want you,” he breathes, angling himself so that the very tip presses against her, just barely. “I really, really want you. I’m not even joking. I wish I was. I just want you so… so bad.”

Wheatley clenches his jaws and bites into his tongue again because every process inside of him is screaming to give in to this compulsion to shove her down and fuck her but he resists, he has to resist, this must be on _his_ terms—this is his facility, he’s in control, he’s the one who’s in charge, not Her, not this, not anybody else—but with Chell so close and in his lap, his willpower is draining alarmingly fast. The look she’s giving him doesn’t help; her whole body is trembling in his grasp, breasts heaving with every inhale, and her eyes have become cool and half-lidded.

“You want this, too, don’t you?” He digs his hands into her hips, fingers pressing into lean muscle and rigid bone. Wetness soaks the head of his cock, dripping in little rivulets and smearing with his own fluid that’s already begun to bead. It aches and he’s so _full_ and his abdomen is seizing up because it’s taking absolutely everything he has not to push further in like he so desperately wants. “You’re just… there’s no way you can’t. Want this, that is. I don’t—hah, I don’t know how much you’re aware, brain damage and all, but you’re just… so fucking wet. God.”

Fire is searing through him, pulling through every circuit and wire and cord and it’s so bloody painful but it feels so _good_. He rubs against her, a slow and tentative gesture. The heat of her jams through synthetic flesh and sensors and nerves and—god, he can’t take it, he’s so desperate, he _needs_ this—and with the Itch clawing down his back and roiling within, he relents at last and sinks the first inch or two of himself into her with a shuddering gasp.

“You’re—ahh, you really… you’re really tiny, aren’t you? I mean, fingers are one thing, ah, several things, actually, but not like… like this. F—fuck.”

Wheatley is stuck on consonants. His mind is blinding static again and he can’t _see_ anything; not a thing, nothing, nothing at all, not even the walls of monitors that should picture her open mouth and her arching backbone. It occurs to him somewhere underneath that something must have gone out, that his augments have failed, that something needs to be fixed, but that’s not important right now, and so it gets shoved down where he can’t sense it anymore.

“God, y-you’re—hah, I can’t take it. I can’t.”

The landscape of her body smooths out beneath his starving hands as the coils shift to hold her in position. Her heartbeat pulses against his palms and he can hear its fluttering thrum inside his body, splicing itself to metallic bones and sinewy synthetic tendon. He doesn’t need to see to know where she is. It doesn’t matter if he’s blind. He can _feel_.

“I need this,” he whispers, grazing his teeth along her shoulder. She’s clenching around the head of his cock and there are inaudible noises pulling out of her throat and everything is so wet and incredible and he absolutely can’t stand it anymore. “Really, I do, I need it, just—just brace yourself. I want us both to feel this. It’ll, hah, it’ll be good, I promise, all right? Just be good for me. I know you can. I’ll—I’ll make you feel bloody amazing.”

His first thrust is like someone has injected him with liquid fire. It ripples from the base of his spinal column and tears up through each port and cable, and as she squeezes around him and sucks him in, he swears there is something among the roiling static that dictates the meaning and purpose of life. He’s being held together by nothing, held _back_ by nothing; he is a deity in this place, and there is no one and nothing that can mock him or tell him no—

_You can’t do this, you can’t_ —

Shut up, you’re ruining this, he won’t stand for it, this isn’t your place anymore—

_But you must, please, please listen, please—_

Shut up! God, don’t you ever shut up? Don’t you ever go away? God’s sake, no one wants you, no one LIKES you, you’re small and stupid and weak, even She saw that, She wanted you dead, She told you that you were a moron and She was bloody _right_ —

_You’ve broken her, you’re destroying her, she’s done so bloody much for you—_

Done? Done what? Oh, sorry, defied him? She should be grateful he’s even wasting his time with her; she could be dancing over lasers and rushing past turrets and hoping bullets don’t split down her spine instead of—

_Why are you DOING this, you can’t, she liked you, she really did, she bloody liked you and you CAN’T—_

“Damn it, shut up, I’ll fuck her as hard as I bloody well like and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!”

He drives in as much as he can with a single stroke. Everything is hot and soaked and _tight_ and god, not even her mouth was like that, she’s so bloody tight, there’s so much friction, he can’t stand it, and with a sharp breath, he draws out and shoves himself back in again. The Itch has become a monster; pleasure pinches down his back and curls around him with each thrust, but it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Before was so perfect and so good and he loved it, but this is just—oh, this is—

“God,” he says, his voice thick and husky, “god, you’re—aaaaah, you’re so good, you feel incredible, _how_ , I—”

Wheatley bites off the last of his sentence in a needy moan and forces it against the tender marks he’s made on her neck, right by the black body of the lingering cord. With the promise of euphoria so very close, he continues to rock his hips and work her down to meet his even rhythm. The cables lend their assistance in the task, tugging her up and pushing her downward by bundles snaked around the crooks of her arms and knees and the edges of her ankles.

“Why couldn’t we have just—you know, why didn’t we just do this before,” he rasps, gripping her hips and shoving her down. The feeling of him filling her up inside makes him shiver and his mind is a blur and all that he can register is the warm, tight wetness around his cock. “None of that—that killing nonsense, you know, just madness, absolutely no point, this is—haaah—this is better, so much better, I mean, god, why kill you? Bloody stupid—just, ahh, could’ve done this the whole time, never would’ve had to go ‘bout wanting you dead, not when you do this to me, oh, _never_.”

The facility around him shakes again, more violent and prevalent than before, but he pays it no mind. Whatever is left of him that can still interpret the surviving data feeds from Her chassis has noted a distinct increase in temperature within the surrounding room, but he assumes that’s because he currently has a test subject directly on top of him and she’s running incredibly hot. It doesn’t matter, anyway. The euphoria is so close. He can feel it. Everything is starting to sharpen and the wracking pleasure spikes with every thrust, but it’s still not enough.

“You’re so—so _tight_.” Wheatley frames her ribs with his hands and cups her breasts, letting the cables continue his work. He can’t see her no matter how many times he tries to refresh his sight, but he knows her mouth is open and he knows she’s breathing so very hard and he knows there’s sweat rolling down her belly and along the curve of her back. “I’m, ah, I know it’s, _hah_ , probably uncomfortable, maybe, I don’t know, but you feel—you feel so bloody good, you really do, I’m—god I want this, I’ve wanted it so bad, I deserve this, come on, _aaah_ , I—”

Somewhere in the midst, Chell kisses him. Or does he kiss her? He doesn’t know; everything is an indiscernible conglomerate of touch and movement and darkness and _yes yes god yes please_. All he knows is that his mouth is on hers and his words are lost on her tongue, and before he knows it, his arms are around her and she’s flush with his chest, so warm, and each stroke into her tightens the Itch to an increasingly unbearable degree.

Breathing against the heat from between her lips and desperate for some kind of release, he picks up the pace. The cables obey without question; they draw her up just high enough, and then lower her down so he can fill her with one hard thrust. The tensing of her inner muscles have him reeling, sparking, running the bare minimum functions, and he has no choice but to groan into her mouth as the cords from the chassis push her down onto his cock. The facility succumbs to another quake, and Wheatley grips onto her, moving his hips, frantic to reach what he cannot achieve alone.

“Come on, come _on_ ,” he chants, driving himself in and out with frenzied haste. “Come on, aaah, give it to me, I want it, _need_ it—it’s so good, just let me, haah, I want to come—you’re _mine_ , you’ve got to, got no bloody choice, I’m your boss, listen to me, god, _obey_ me, _give it_ —”

Everything comes to a halting stop as the solution euphoria pumps in. Pleasure lances through his inner circuitry, hot and burning and endless, and it threatens to imprint itself through every active task and process. He can’t parse anything; he’s overcome, swept away, submerged, consumed; the data feeds have become nothing but meaningless packets of unintelligible disjointed code. He’s hilt-deep, pulsing within her as his hips continue to rock with shallow, not-quite thrusts. A surge of thick fluid fills her and he pushes in as deep as he can, riding the rest of the high. His entire body shakes with the facility beneath; the peak is too far, too high, too much; he’s somehow dizzy and satisfied and whole; nothing is better than this; this is what it’s like being god; it’s so good, so amazing; this is all he ever wants: euphoria, the facility, and her.

As the Itch recedes in a sudden sharp withdrawal, Wheatley is left in spinning shock. The noise in his head seems to still into a cool, eerie silence, and he feels something retract its claws as it plummets away somewhere inside. He’s left in his chair, gasping, blind and free and overwhelmed and utterly distraught, and with Chell clutched tightly against his chest. He doesn’t know why or how, but the solution dose must have sent the Other into remission—to recover, perhaps? He can only hope.

Gently, he cradles her close as he slumps down into the body of the chair, pulling himself out from within her. Somehow among his garbled thoughts, he manages to execute the proper subroutines to banish the coiled cables around her body. They withdraw with what seems like reluctance, snaking up and away from her with tentative movements back toward the chassis. He can’t see, but angry marks and molded flesh are left in their wake under the pads of his curious fingers.

“Hey,” he whispers against her ear, his hands kneading down her shoulder blades in what he hopes are soothing patterns. “Listen, please, I’m—He’s gone. All right? It’s okay, He’s gone. I don’t know how long I’ve got before He comes back. Listen, please, I need you to—to disconnect some of these. All right? Can you do that?”

With ginger movements, he encompasses one of her small hands in his own and guides it toward the back of his neck. Opening her fingers, he closes them around one of the black cables and sets the force of her grip. She doesn’t resist his lead, and that alone unspools another torrent of icy guilt.

“Just—just tug them out,” says Wheatley, coaxing her to unplug the cable. “Well, some of them. Not all of them, though. I-I still need some sort of connection to work what’s left. But if I’m not fully integrated, it might delay it. Or at least I hope. I really, really hope.”

The facility shudders beneath him, hot and violent and furious, and then all of the alerts and warnings he’s suppressed come spilling out of his internal queue in a discord of shouts and screams. One in particular reroutes to the room, the loudest of them all, distortion and clatter and peril:

“WARNING: CORE OVERHEATING. NUCLEAR MELTDOWN IMMINENT.”

“Oh, god,” he whispers. “God, that’s not good. Can’t be good. All right, come on now, hurry, one at a time, come on.”

Wheatley leans forward, taking a hold of her other hand to help her reach. The one wrapped around the cord at his back finally disengages it with a rough yank, and for a split moment everything freezes: sound, data feeds, error strings, processing, everything; a silent and still snapshot of chaos. Pain digs into his receptors, sharp and grating, and he grits his teeth together as it floods him.

“Aaaaaaaah—no, that’s it, I’m fine, really, I’m fine, go on, I just—”

He hisses as another cable is removed from the port column down his backbone. Her hands have begun to move on their own accord now, although he doesn’t know if that can be interpreted as good or bad after what he’s done.

God. What has he done?

_What has He done?_

“That one hurt,” he mumbles into the darkness, but it doesn’t matter; nothing matters right now. He has to be disconnected or something terrible will happen. “No, go on, keep going, couple more now, you’re doing great, you’re fantastic, come on, aagh—” Another flash of gnarled warnings stringing into elongated cries as more are wrenched free. “—okay, perfect, no, that’s great, I-I’m good now, should be fine.”

Only two cords remain, bolted right where his skull meets his spine: the two main channels to control the bare bones of the facility. Chell’s hands have retreated elsewhere. He thinks she may be holding herself or tending to her sure-to-be-bruises, but he can’t quite discern in the dark. His frayed disconnection from the mainframe offers him a much blurrier picture with too much missing detail; he can’t rely on it to guide him any longer.

Drawing in a breath, Wheatley opens his arms and gathers her up. When he cinches around her waist and starts to lift himself from the chair, she slugs him full on in the chest. Agony ripples through his receptors, and he crumples forward to the floor with her in tow, knees slamming against cold metal panels. In the midst, she attempts to wriggle out, and he can feel the warmth of her slipping as she thrashes out from his grasp.

“No, come on, _please_ ,” he begs, blindly reaching after her. His hand clasps onto her leg, but she kicks it away. “Come on, I’ve got to get you out of here, only I can get you across. You can’t jump that, believe me, He made sure of it, especially not without those boots. Oh, god, your boots. Where are they?”

He tries to remember, but something might have been damaged. He doesn’t even know if his memories are stored locally anymore. That might explain the file accessing issue and the database conundrum, he supposes.

“Look, I-I can’t see that well. Something’s on the blink… augments stopped working or something, I don’t know—no, come on, forget the boots, I need you to guide me.”

Crawling, he feels out for her along the metal with splayed fingers. The soft scuffles of her movement pricks through his sensors, but he can’t quite place where she is. Everything feels like it’s spinning.

“Please?” He would know if she jumped, right? “I know you—I understand, I know, you don’t want anything to do with me, that’s fine, completely for it, I’m… I just want to get you out. I promise. I know, I know I promised before, but this is—just, not to rush you in any way, but this is extremely time sensitive, as in I literally do not know how much time before this bloody place explodes or before He comes back, so please, let me get you out of here while that’s still an option. A very, very fastly fading option.”

When she touches his shoulders, Wheatley finds that she’s clothed again. She must have gone to retrieve the orange jumpsuit he left near the edge of the platform. Honestly, he doesn’t blame her. He did manage to shred the rest, after all. The reminder sinks under his metal carapace and twists among wires and lines of coding, sluicing remorse and regret through what little function he has left.

Awkwardly, Wheatley manages to rise to his knees. The receptors in his abdomen still sting with hurt and it’s difficult to maintain a proper posture, but he holds out his arms for her. “Need you to guide me,” he says, scooping her up. “Ah, over to the lift. You can do that, can’t you? Just… uh, tap me on the arm or something. However you want. Her body and all the little guys’ll do the rest.”

Chell does so to the best of her ability. She squeezes the flesh on his forearms to direct him either left, right, or straight. The cables from the chassis coil around Wheatley’s legs and bring them across according his blind interpretation of her wordless navigation. When she taps both of his arms at once, he brings them to a halt.

“Is this it? Are we there?” Tentatively, he reaches out with his foot. When his toes touch the cool surface of metal, he wills the cables to let them descend upon the platform. “All right… all right, good. Here we are, down you go. Careful now.”

He lets her go with shaking hands. Chell twists away in a heartbeat; shifting toward the lift, he’s sure. In the back of his head, he struggles with the subroutines that trigger events in the facility. One of them has to be what he’s looking for, so he keeps executing them until he finally hears the hiss of the doors sliding open and the hum of the machinery as it rises from its place beneath the floor to meet her.

“Go on, get in,” he urges. “I’m… I’m rerouting the lift. It’ll take you to the surface. I-I don’t know where exactly or… or what’s up there. I’m too disconnected, I can’t access the maps of the facility. Not that I really could to begin with. Um, don’t know where anything is. But it’ll take you, okay? It will. You’ll be out of here. You’ll be free. And when you get out, run. God, please, run. This place—”

The entire room buckles with a vibrating quake, monitors snapping from the walls. He hears the screech of metal clashing against metal, and then broken pieces glittering down to the open abyss underneath the platform. The inferno is closer now, fierce and raging and impossibly hot, climbing up from the world down below, and everything clamps up inside of him as he tries to halt all that might impede her escape.

“This place is… it’s done for,” he breathes. “You’ve got to run, _please_ , you’ll be killed, I can’t—”

Another tremor cracks through the chamber. Wheatley sinks to his knees in a heap on the floor, the final two cables resting along the length of his back. Something inside of him is wrong, wrong, _wrong_ ; it’s coming back now, slowly, rising up—

“I… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never—I never meant for this. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. I was going to call the lift for you. I was. I _meant_ to. I wanted us to leave, I really did. Just—something _happened_ and then I couldn’t…”

He can’t see, but he glances toward where the cables stretch across the room and roll back up into the bulk of the chassis overhead. The data feeds are jumbled and mashed together and it’s difficult to create a clear picture, but he knows there are spools of the black lines up there, going every which way, stretching across the room to where they let him take her.

“Something’s up there,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry. I-I didn’t… I didn’t _want_ this.”

Somewhere on the outskirts of his perception, he senses her draw close. The scuffs of her long fall boots flicker in his head and he flinches in anticipation of some sort of deserved punishment or retribution for what he’s done—but it’s not.

Gently, her fingers line his jaws and her lips press to the tip of his nose.

“I know.”

Wheatley opens his mouth to reply—there’s so much he needs to say, _needs_ to say; there’s so much he wants to apologize for, so much, so incredibly much—but before he can, a vivid and violent red seeps into the darkness of his vision and then the feeling of wrongness overwhelms him.

“Oh, god,” he rasps. “God, He’s coming back. Quickly, go, get in, you’ve got to go, get to the surface, go, _go_!”

Not even a second passes before the whisk of the lift door closing registers in his head. He can feel the gears start to churn as the lift starts its hasty ascent, and he imagines her there, looking out the glass at him from above, still stoic and beautiful and tenacious as ever, and it makes something within him ache.

She’s out of the Lair and onto the next set of chambers above before his strength wears out and He returns. The Other’s animosity is damning, crushing, consuming; it rips into him and tears at every thread and active process until he’s ready to scream, but he curls in on himself and bites his tongue, channeling everything he has left to keep Him at bay.

_WHERE IS SHE—_

“No, you can’t, leave her alone—”

_WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HER—_

“She’s gone, she’s gone, I’ve let her go, you can’t—”

_SHE CAN’T BE GONE, SHE’S THE ONLY LIVING TEST SUBJECT, HOW AM I—_

“She’s gone, I set her loose! She’s on her way to the bloody surface now and there’s nothing you can do about it, she’s FREE—”

_YOU CAN’T DO THIS, DON’T, THINK OF ALL YOU’RE GIVING UP—_

“I can do it and will, and you know what, I already did, so there’s sod all you can do about it—”

_YOU WILL REGRET EVERYTHING, YOU CAN’T DO THIS—_

“Yes, I can, that’s the great thing about being in control, I bloody well can and—”

_I MADE YOU A GOD—_

“Oh, that’s right, you did, didn’t you? You did, but you know what—”

_I MADE YOU_ —

“No, SHUT UP! It’s my turn now, and you know what? If I’m a god and you’re going against my will, my _command_ , what does that make you?”

Wheatley gathers himself and stands to his feet, turning to glare blindly at the hulking form of the chassis bolted into the ceiling. Thick black cables string up from across the room and into its sides; the rest hang limp by his chair in the center platform, dangling in the stagnant, adrenal vapor fueled air.

“I’m back in control now,” he seethes through gritted teeth. “All right? You hear me? You’re not getting her again. You’re not. She’s not yours. She’s… she doesn’t deserve this. God, she was kept here for who knows how long—not that you’d know that, would you? Never bothered to learn about her, never wanted to read her files, nothing but _use_ her—she was just, _here_ , constantly, having to test for Her and then having to test for—for _me_ —and then just…”

His fists clench and he presses the heels of his palms against his forehead, pushing back the Other’s attempts to wrest control from him again. It’s creeping and sharp, dragging in places it never should; a shadow sinking down through everything, _everything_ , his components, his programming, his core, his very essence; it pulls and pries and slips in through splinters and fractures, dominating from the inside out.

_YOU’RE GIVING ALL OF THIS UP_ —

“I don’t bloody care what I’m—”

_HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ACHIEVE SOLUTION EUPHORIA NOW_ —

“I don’t _want_ the stupid fucking euphoria, I _don’t_ —”

_BUT YOU DO, I KNOW YOU DO, WE BOTH LOVED IT_ —

“Shut up, no, I didn’t, I don’t want it—”

_YOU ENJOYED WHAT WE DID TO HER_ —

“God DAMN it, shut up—”

_YOU LOVED IT, YOU WANTED HER_ —

“I—”

Wheatley clenches his jaws and slams his fists into the panel beneath him. The fires below have started to enter the walls, he can feel it, they’re festering inside of him and it’s almost too much to bear, but he has to keep her safe—she’s so close now, she must be, he can still feel the lift running somewhere—it doesn’t matter what it takes, it doesn’t, he’ll keep Him from her, whatever the cost.

“No,” he breathes. “I-I didn’t. I didn’t. Not… not like this. I never wanted to hurt her. I-If she wanted to—if she wanted me I—”

_SHE NEVER WOULD HAVE WANTED YOU, MORON_ —

“No, _YOU’RE_ the bloody moron! You let me back in charge! Smart move, letting me in, right when you’re off recovering or whatever else after _using_ her! And guess what? We’re all going to bloody die! The whole facility is going to self-destruct!”

He smashes his hand through the panel, flesh splintering and wires and metallic bones staring back at his unseeing eyes. Through the hole, the maw below glows with an increasing heat. Warnings are slamming through his mind in an endless stream, _error, error, nuclear meltdown, imminent annihilation, please evacuate_ , but he stares into nothingness and clenches his broken hand.

“I don’t want to die,” says Wheatley. “But I’m… I’m going to let it.”

**_YOU WILL NOT_ ** _—_

Before Wheatley can react, cables whip from the chassis in a flurry and rope toward him, coiling up around his legs and arms. They constrict, twisting too tight, threatening to compress and break through his alloyed hull. Wrenching him off of the platform, they snake him toward the center of the room, climbing up toward Her body.

“Stop it!” He tries to break free, but he’s too damaged, too weak; his strength can’t match that of the slew of cords and so he’s wrapped up in a tangle he can’t fight. “Stop it, what are you _doing_? This isn’t going to make it any better! You’re fucking mental, it’s too late, the place is still going to explode whether you’re in charge or not!”

_I NEED HER—_

The walls have begun to fissure. Surviving monitors shatter and break away, plummeting down into the fires below. He can’t see, but the platform beneath Her body is starting to unhinge and fall apart. The chair, bolted to one of the remaining panels, descends into the swelling inferno.

_THIS IS MY FACILITY—_

“Not your facility, mate,” says Wheatley, plunging a hand into the chassis.

Metal crunches against his knuckles. Wires wrap around his fingers and spark when he squeezes and rips. The Other thrashes inside of him in a whirling rage; the tumult of voices starts to dim and flames crawl up all around, encroaching Her body’s hull.

The lift has made it to the surface. He’s too far disconnected to truly feel, but he imagines her stepping out between the glass doors. He imagines her running for her life, lungs pumping and legs pushing her to the freedom she so desperately seeks.

He hopes it’s nice up there.

He hopes she’ll be safe.

“It’s _mine_.”

 


End file.
